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| Umwelt und Raum | |
| Energie | |
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Digitalizing the human
body
Cultural and institutional contexts of computer based image processing in medical practice. The case of MRI in Switzerland David Gugerli, Barbara Orland, Regula Burri During the last quarter of this century, medical practice has undergone a profound technological change. The physicians’ technical means to visualize the structure, the functions, and the deficiencies of the human body have seen a development whose weight is only comparable to the emergence of the anatomic theater in early modern times and the introduction of x-ray techniques at the end of the 19th century. Computer based imaging technologies such as ultrasound, computer assisted tomography, positrone emission tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging have dramatically amplified the possibilities of medical diagnosis and intervention. The generally accepted historical account of late 20th century’s medical imaging devices usually stresses the continuity of technological progress towards the transparency of the human body. Our research project, however, tries radically to contextualize the evolution of these devices within the last three decades’ development of a electronics and computer based visual culture. From there we want to understand our society’s enormous fascination for a digitalized human body. Concentrating on the example of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in Switzerland, we want to answer the following questions: What have been the Swiss society’s main reasons to allocate vast sums of public funds in MRI research and medical infrastructure? What kind of alliances have transformed the heterogeneous motives of chemists, physicists, physicians, patients, industrials, universities, and hospitals into a rather homogeneous set of interests which found – at least until very recently – an unquestioned focal point in a machine that allowed for the production of a digitalized human body? What social forces and technical necessities have put the machine in its actual place? Which technical procedures have changed the episteme of the bodies that are subject to MRI scanning routines? Which institutional innovations and adjustments have occurred during the MRI’s career from the chemist’s laboratory bench up to its present position as an indispensable diagnostic tool in medical practice? The project’s approach to a comprehensive understanding of these adjustments between society and technology is to be found on the level of discursive currents. As emerging from a wide range of printed materials such as journals, newspapers, conference proceedings, and expert accounts, sociotechnical and medical discourses were constantly pursuing an effective resonance in other discursive fields, thus leading towards strong complexes of interest and uniform patterns of association between the social and the technological. This association will be analyzed on three interdependent fields: (1) the sociotechnical network that moved MRI techniques first between disciplines like chemistry, physics, electronics, computer sciences, and medicine and that finally installed it in the context of contemporary hospitals, simultaneously turning it into an icon for “cutting edge” high-technology medicine; (2) the institutional collaboration between the scientific and engineering community at the ETH and the University of Zurich on the one hand, and Spectrospin as an early and extremely successful ETH spin-off on the other hand; (3) the effects of MRI on the social shaping and perception of the human body, which – under a new economy of the computer mediated medical gaze – substituted traditional invasive diagnostic procedures for a “digitally augmented reality”.See also the program of an international workshop on "Normal Images", held at the Monte Verità Conference Center november 5 to november 10, 2000. |
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Letzte Änderung:
1-12-2005
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