He had always dreamed of a life at sea. Antonio, 34, had taken passage on the merchant ship Itaca, headed for Cape Town. That morning Antonio felt less than brilliant; he felt weak, had a strange burning sensation in his stomach and an imperceptible but constant pain in his chest. Mario, his friend and a medical orderly, knew perfectly what was happening. An early, high-sensitivity diagnosis could save his friend’s life. Today, thanks to the availability of high-tech portable instrumentation with central control via satellite from an analytical laboratory, such a diagnosis is possible, even in a difficult environment like that of a merchant ship.
Antonio, diagnosed as suffering from a myocardial infarction, was immediately airlifted to hospital in Dakar for treatment. Today he can continue to live out his dreams.
Thanks to developments in diagnostics technology it is now possible to carry out high-level diagnoses even in difficult environments such as a ship on the high seas or an oil platform. Remote diagnostics with satellite monitoring is today the new frontier for laboratory medicine, able to save lives by providing massive geographical coverage without sacrificing the quality of diagnostic data, tanks to remote control by professional operators.
Authors: S. Berti – P. Isidori
Reproduced by kind permission of Assobiomedica, Italy (
www.assobiomedica.it)