Welcome, Readers!
By Nitish Thakor
Welcome to the August 2012 issue of the Life Sciences Newsletter! We have some interesting and provocative information for you in this issue! Read on for an overview of this issue’s content, and an invitation.
This month’s interview is with Dr. Olaf Such, the Global Head of Clinical Science, Magnetic Resonance Imaging Systems, Philips Healthcare, based in Best, the Netherlands. Dr. Such tells you how he sees medical practice in the next decade being influenced by today’s technology breakthroughs. We interviewed him at our recent Technology Time Machine Symposium, which was held this year in Dresden, Germany.
We are given an exciting view of the emerging medical and healthcare technologies of the next decade in the first installment of a two part report on 10 areas to keep an eye on. Dr. Atam Dhawan, of the New Jersey Institute of Technology shares this insight with us. (The second part of the report will be presented in next month’s Newsletter.)
Dr. Olaf Such also is featured in an article on the global need for distributed healthcare. He points out the upcoming crisis, throughout the world, in providing healthcare to an aging population, and presents the case for a distributed care system as the solution.
The reliability of medical devices is an increasingly important topic as we rely on them for all aspects of healthcare. Dr. Mary Capelli-Schellpfeffer of Loyola University describes how new prognostics methods might be applied to medical devices to improve their reliability and to predict the remaining life of a device.
Finally, an invitation. The editors of the IEEE periodical, The Institute, are looking for IEEE members who are working in life sciences who would care to be interviewed for an article on what it takes to get into the field. If you are interested, please contact the editors of The Institute.
We look forward to your active participation in this Newsletter. We hope that many of you will send us your comments and suggestions and submit cutting-edge scientific news stories, share emerging technologies, discoveries and breakthroughs for possible publication in future issues. Send them to us at lsnews@ieee.org.
Nitish Thakor, Editor-In-Chief
Lee Moffitt, Managing Editor
lsnews@ieee.org
Olaf Such is currently the Global Head of Clinical Science, Magnetic Resonance Imaging Systems, Philips Healthcare, based in Best, the Netherlands. 
Atam P. Dhawan, Ph.D., obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, and Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba, in Electrical Engineering. 
Mary Capelli-Schellpfeffer, MD, MPA, is Medical Director of Loyola University Health System's Occupational Health Services, and Associate Professor, Department of Medicine...