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A new study by researchers at the University of Warwick in England has made extensive use of the Xbox 360 to find heart defects and help prevent heart attacks.
As it stands now, models of heart usage often require the use of supercomputers or a network of computers. With the Xbox 360, the results are generated up to five times faster, with costs that are ten times less expensive than the alternative.
Consoles are proving to be more than just an entertainment outlet. The PlayStation 3 is also being put to use by researchers at the University of Massachusetts to simulate black hole collisions.
The system, detailed in a study in the August edition of the Journal of Computational Biology and Chemistry, is based on a video-game demo created by Simon Scarle two years ago when he was a software engineer at Microsoft's Rare studio, the division of the U.S.-based company that designs games for the Xbox 360. Scarle modified a chip in the console so that instead of producing graphics for the game, it now delivers data tracking how electrical signals in the heart move around damaged cardiac cells. This creates a model of the heart that allows doctors to identify heart defects or conditions such as arrhythmia, a disturbance in the normal rhythm of the heart that causes it to pump less effectively.
"This is a clever use of a processing chip ... to speed up calculations of heart rhythm. What used to take hours can be calculated in seconds, without having to employ an extremely expensive, high-performance computer," Denis Noble, director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University, tells TIME.
"This is a clever use of a processing chip ... to speed up calculations of heart rhythm. What used to take hours can be calculated in seconds, without having to employ an extremely expensive, high-performance computer," Denis Noble, director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University, tells TIME.
As it stands now, models of heart usage often require the use of supercomputers or a network of computers. With the Xbox 360, the results are generated up to five times faster, with costs that are ten times less expensive than the alternative.
Consoles are proving to be more than just an entertainment outlet. The PlayStation 3 is also being put to use by researchers at the University of Massachusetts to simulate black hole collisions.