MEDICINE
Reproduced with permission from NeXT
Computer, Inc.
A Reference
Guide to NeXT in Higher Education, Fall 1992
ยช
1992 NeXT Computer, Inc
More than ever, medical researchers and practitioners are
faced with an information explosion, and they are concerned
about the impact this is having on the quality of both
medical education and the delivery of health care at their
institutions. At medical schools throughout North America,
physicians and researchers are turning to NeXT technology
to help them use this abundance of information to their
advantage.
With the only complete object-oriented development
environment and operating system available on a desktop
computer, NeXT is at the forefront of the emerging academic
discipline known as medical informatics. Using NeXT
machines, researchers at top medical institutions, like
Oregon Health Sciences University, are developing
innovative information processing support applications for
clinicians. And thanks to NeXTSTEP, many researchers are
creating entire program interfaces without writing a single
line of code-and developing applications five to ten times
faster than they could in any other software development
environment.
Physicians at the University of Minnesota, for example, are
using NeXTSTEP to develop an expert workstation pertaining
to transfusion medicine. "We wouldn't have been able to
complete the workstation in time if we were working in any
other environment," project leader Donald Connelly says. At
Oregon Health Sciences University, researchers are creating
a model in the NeXTSTEP environment that predicts the
medical outcome of various procedures. The researchers then
cross-validate the results using Zilla, a powerful NeXTSTEP
computation application that project leader Kent Spackman
says when combined with a network of NeXT computers "is
like having the capabilities of a supercomputer," but costs
less than ten percent as much to purchase and requires far
less electricity and maintenance to operate.
These two projects are just a sample of the exciting
NeXT-based activities underway in the medical
community-projects that will no less than transform the way
medical researchers, educators, and professionals conduct
research and deliver health care.