NIGERIAN engineers and medical doctors have, for the first time, developed computer software packages that can assist clinicians in early and cheap screening and treatment of patients at risk, and treatment procedures for diabetes and stroke patients in any crisis situations, using the developed equations and visual basic application tools.
The researchers include Prof. Alfred Akpoveta Susu of the Department of Chemical & Polymer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Lagos State University; Dr. Babagana Gutti of Department of Chemical & Polymer Engineering University of Maiduguiri and Prof. Susu’s PhD student; and Dr Femi Fasamade an Associate Professor of Medicine at the College of Medicine University of Lagos (CMUL)/Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Idi-Araba.
What led to the discovery? Leader of the team, Susu, in an interview with The Guardian said: “I had a stroke some years ago and was flown to the United Kingdom for treatment. I noticed that the British people were not using the hospital. It is not available for their people. It is too expensive. The facility in the National Health Scheme (NHS) that is available for them is not of high quality. For example, in the United States of America (U.S.A.), half a million people die of stroke every year in spite of their facilities. The truth is that those sophisticated facilities are not available to the ordinary people because they cannot afford it.
“We need to combine engineering and medicine in order to make the facility available and affordable to poor people not middle class. If we can help do that it means that you do not need to see a doctor, you can see nurses so that the cost is less, and the facility is now available to you. That is the whole thing behind biomedical engineering.”
“Now, we are chemical engineers and I said what can we do to bring medical care to the common man? The guy in the village cannot see a specialist. So what we did was to talk to medical people. They are very conservative people. We said, look you are in the medical field, we know mathematics, we know modeling, we know simulation. Why don’t we tap your brain, put it into mathematical forms, build models and then simulate and then create soft wares. We can now train nurses together so that they can deal with the problems. So it will be available at the Primary Health Care (PHC) centres. That is the guiding spirit behind our work. We have succeeded that was why I came and my PhD student has got a doctorate. The first thing we did was look at diabetes and stroke,” he added.
Susu said people in the rural areas do not have access to specialist medical care, and when they have complications like stroke they do not have specialists to look at them and they cannot afford to travel to the cities. The Chemical Engineer said even when they have complications they do not have any doctor to look at them. He said what his team has done is to link up with Dr. Fasanmade of CMUL, who is an expert in diabetes….
Copyright, Blaise APLOGAN, 2010,© Bienvenu sur Babilown
Toute republication de cet article doit en mentionner et l’origine et l’auteur sous peine d’infraction
Commentaires