I would love to sit here and tell you that playing ‘Red Dead Redemption’ can magically shield you from x-rays but to be a little more specific it’s video game technology that reduces the exposure.

Cone Beam CT scans are a big part of Image Guided Radiation Therapy which targets tumors while trying to leave the surrounding area as undamaged as possible. The downside is that multiple scans leave doctors and patients on edge.

There have been machines made to minimize the radiation but they have for the most part not been effective for being quick in producing data or even complete data. Other machines have also been loud which does nothing for the comfort of the patient either. Researchers at UCSD have created a CT reconstruction algorithm for a graphic processing unit that was made specifically for gaming.

The new method resulted in 36 to 72 times less radiation according to Xun Jia, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSD. Steve Jiang, senior author of the study and an associate professor of radiation oncology at UCSD, was quoted as saying:

CT dose has become a major concern of medical community. For each year’s use of today’s scanning technology, the resulting cancers could cause about 14,500 deaths. Our work, when extended from cancer radiotherapy to general diagnostic imaging, may provide a unique solution to solve this problem by reducing the CT dose per scan by a factor of 10 or more

Now it’s not even the games themselves that are helping patients it’s the tech used to make them thats being used in medicine. I’ve written posts about games easing pain and games helping people stay sober and now it seems like almost every aspect of gaming is being adapted to be used for undeniable good.

Video Games Reduce X-Ray Radiation [Medical Breakthroughs Reported By Ivanhoe]