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"  The Xbox 360 may have Halo 3, but good luck if you ever get a tumor. Sony&amp;#039;s PlayStation 3, on the other hand, may now offer another helping hand to the medical world, according to researchers at the Mayo Clinic.  A chip originally created for the PS3 may be the key to greatly improving the way doctors monitor a tumor&amp;#039;s growth via computed tomography (CT) scans. The number of images produced from just a single CT scan can overwhelm current computers. But, as anyone who&amp;#039;s played MotorStorm knows, the PS3&amp;#039;s Cell Broadband Engine processes data like a Hummer guzzles gas. Researchers announced on Monday that the Cell chip might speed up CT scan results tenfold, providing earlier opportunities for diagnosis, treatment and preventative measures. &amp;quot;We are at a point with standards in technology and new genomic based analytic techniques where we can achieve more in the next 10 years than we&amp;#039;ve achieved in the last 100,&amp;quot; said Mayo Clinic president and CEO Denis Cortese. The team at the legendary non-profit medical coalition, however, stressed that the superscans were very much in the planning stage. Through a partnership with IBM, the Mayo Clinic will develop the Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center, which will focus efficient health screening and imaging.  But this isn&amp;#039;t the first time the PS3&amp;#039;s power has been employed for fighting disease. Last year, Stanford launched its Folding@Home program, which borrowed processing muscle from the Sony gaming system to create protein-folding programs for fighting\u2014and possibly curing\u2014cancer.  If the Mayo-IBM research proves successful, the fact that the Cell chips are already being so widely produced (PS3 sales hit 1.2 million during the holidays) could make it that much more affordable for smaller labs to improve their own image processing. Now you know why the system costs so much.... \u2014Brian Lisi  RELATED STORIES \u2022 EARLIER: PS3 Fights Cancer With Processing Power  \u2022 PLUS: Microsoft Calculates HIV as Bio-Spam in Race for Vaccine   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a2495/4244295/>