Daily Mail has a story about new Philips CT scanner that can produce awesome full-body scans of the whole body in a minute (via Gizmodo).

The machine costs $2 million which sounds like a big sum but I realized it actually isn’t that much. For example, the city of Helsinki is considering building a massive drive-through tunnel under the city where the latest projected cost (that I heard) was 750 million Euros. $2 million is measly 1.35 million euros which means that at the cost of the tunnel, you could purchase 200 of these machines (271 million euros), then use, say, 350 millions to build a massive scanner complex and then spend 130 million on hiring people to man the machines. (Obviously you’d need to invest a lot more to pull this off but humor me here.)

At 10 people / machine / hour for 7 hours a day, 300 days a year the entire population of Finland could be scanned in about 15 months.

A system like this would more or less completely eliminate surprises from cancers and various blood clots, which in turn would probably save a hell of a lot of money on the long run.

Given that this would be possible to pull off already now, I guess full body CT for all will happen in 10-15 years, when the scanners have dropped significantly in price. Can’t wait to see what I look inside! :D