Xbox used to diagnose heart conditions

September 29, 2009

Whoever thought that an annoying gaming console can save your life? Well, annoying for those are not playing on it, because otherwise, popular gaming consoles can get pretty addictive.

So, a computer scientist from the University of Warwick, UK, has figured out a way to use an Xbox 360 to detect heart defects and prevent heart attacks. This new device has a huge potential for the medical industry, as current methods that are employed in order to detect and treat heart illnesses are much slower and expensive than this simple Xbox tool.

The system, which was described in a study included in the August issue of the Journal of Computational Biology and Chemistry, is based on a video game demonstration made by Simon Scarle about two years ago, when he worked as a software engineer for Microsoft Rare Studio, a special division of the company that develops games for Xbox 360. He altered a chip in the console so that, instead of producing graphics for the game, it would deliver data that tracks the way in which electrical signals in the heart move around damaged cardiac cells. In this way, a model of the heart is generated that enables doctors to identify heart defects or conditions (such as arrhythmia).

With the current resources, a similar heart model would require the use of supercomputers or of networks of PCs that would calculate millions of mathematical equations for the proteins, cells and tissues of the heart, which is an expensive and time-consuming process. The modified Xbox tool can provide the same results at a rate of five times faster and 10 times cheaper, the study reports.

Powerful computer graphics are also used from other gaming consoles. At the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, researchers are using Sony PlayStations to simulate black-hole collisions in order to find out what happens when a super massive black hole swallows a star.

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