IKC Annual Review 2016 1 | Page 12

Medical Technologies IKC | 12 Companion technologies As medicine becomes more personalised, developing technologies that help clinicians understand the needs of each individual patient becomes ever more important. Companion technologies being developed by the Medical Technologies IKC will help clinicians to understand more about a disease or a defect in the context of patients’ personal circumstances, which will help them to make the right treatment decisions and offer more precise surgery. The companion technologies being developed by the Medical Technologies IKC are designed to do exactly this, from developing new imaging technologies that can give rapid diagnosis of heart attack to supporting new diagnostic technologies that can detect disease biomarkers or predict a patient’s likely response to treatment. Progress in this area is particularly needed in the field of orthopaedics, where medical intervention often only happens once a joint has failed and joint replacement surgery is the only option. Companion technologies being developed by the Medical Technologies IKC will help clinicians to understand more about a disease or a defect in the context of patients’ personal circumstances, which will help them to make the right treatment decisions and offer more precise surgery. This is particularly important when making a case for early-stage clinical intervention: with the right imaging and diagnostic tools, patients can be offered effective therapies that will enable them to heal faster and enjoy a better quality of life for longer.