Yearly check-up: 15-05-2017
Today I went to see the doctor for my yearly check-up. A friend of mine suggested a new clinical department where they use a special diagnostic system called "Virtual Physiological Human" or VPH in short.
When I arrived the nurse led me into a room stuffed with strange equipment and a huge wall-size holo-screen on one side. Dr. Smith, my physician, came in and started to interact with the computer using the natural gesture-eye interface. Big deal! Even my game box has this type of interface, nowadays.
The holo-screen projected a 3D model of the human body; with a few gestures, the doctor made evident a number of physiological signals that I understood were coming from the model. Ok, this is the VPH. After scrutinizing it some more, I realised that this computer body was breathing, moving its eyes, etc. In response to a vocal command by the Doctor, it started to walk around, and I could see with perfect accuracy the muscle contracting under the skin. The VPH started to jog, and after a short while I noticed small drops of sweat forming on its brows. The doctor made the skin on the chest transparent, and suddenly I could see the heart beating, the blood flowing in the vessels and changing colour when passing through the lungs.
A quick zoom exposed the tissue of a muscle in the arm; the doctor showed me the nutrients arriving at the muscle fibres, the nervous signals sent from the brain to the motor axons, and the electrochemical process that made the muscle contract and exert force. Well, this was impressive!
But still I did not understand what this had to do with my yearly check-up. The doctor asked me to undress and to stand on a small platform. A laser scan quickly passed over my whole body; suddenly the generic model on the screen changed and it was me! It was my size and my shape. It even had my face.
With a simple voice command by the doctor, the VPH automatically marked all the blemishes on the skin. The doctor quickly took a look at a few of those that the computer had marked in red; he clicked on two of them and suddenly a small robotic arm came out the wall, and pointed to these two small moles. On the screen a highly enlarged picture of each mole appeared.
Meanwhile I realised that my digital counterpart was starting to emit a number of signals. The doctor gave a command and the system zoomed in at the feet, where a small dot was plotting a very complex line; after a little while I understood that dot was my centre of gravity, and if I moved, it followed my motion. The doctor asked me to close my eyes, raise my arms, stand on one foot, and a lot of all those nonsense things doctors ask you to do on these occasions. But the amazing thing was that while this was happening I could see how the internal organs of my body worked. Dr. Smith applied to my skin a number of small sensors; he explained to me that they would wirelessly transmit many physiological signals to the computer. At that point I realised that the VPH started to breath with me; I held my breath, and the VPH stopped as well! I touched my wrist, and I could feel the beat of my heart fully synchronised with that of the VPH. Weird!
The doctor asked me to mount an exercise bike and start pedalling. I could see my muscles contracting, my joints articulating, my heart beating! The doctor zoomed into the heart region, and the VPH showed some coloured dots that the doctor told me represented the various molecules and electrical signals that are exchanged to keep the heart beating.
The doctor told me something required further attention: I started to get nervous. They took me into another room and put me inside a big machine (they called it a high resolution MRI) that made a pulsing noise for a few seconds.
Back to the holo-screen where my heart model was now huge, full of details, and with a number of graphs with strange numbers around it. The doctor studied it for a while and then told me everything was fine for now, but that I could have problems in the future. He showed me a thickening in a vessel near the heart, and told me that if this thickening increased, it could disturb the flow of the blood to the heart. The VPH gave the chemical composition of this stuff, and the doctor suggested it might have something to do with my cholesterol levels. Maybe I did not look sufficiently impressed, because he opened a new view over a very complex VR representation (he told me it was a world-wide database of cardiovascular diseases), searched for a short while, and then showed me another heart with a thickening like mine, but much more pronounced. The blood flow was much reduced in this case, and the heart was beating in a very strange way. Although most of numbers on the screen did not make any sense to me, it was clear something was seriously wrong. OK, I told him, I got the message.
He gave me a memory stick, which he said contained all my data, some dietary recommendations, and a cardiovascular training program to load onto my home computer. I left the hospital with a clear sense of understanding of my health. No more bacon for breakfast!