Modern Medicine is somehow tending to evolve by giving more and more refined treatments to all patients based on their specific characteristics. This approach has been usually referred to as “personalized medicine”. However, medicine has been personalized for as long as people have been practicing it.
In the last century, by contrast, medicine did progress by adopting guidelines aimed to offer highly standardized protocols and avoid nonevidence-based approaches. More recently, however, a new era has begun, the era of precision medicine, where personalized approach is reached through a more exact and profound knowledge of both patients and diseases. Tremendous progresses have been made in all fields of medicine, benefitting on improved technologies. Indeed, technology has dramatically increased diagnostic and therapeutic options, from high throughput genomics to robotic surgery, from advanced imaging to real time pathogens detection, from hyperbaric chambers to hydrogen-based therapies.
In the first issue of Digital Medicine and Healthcare Technology, a few different examples of how technology can impact precision medicine have been offered. I hope you will find the articles published useful for research and that you will contribute with your valuable findings.
Yours,
Professor Pier Paolo Piccaluga
University of Bologna, Italy
