At the Web 2.0 Summit  General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt  gave the first public viewing of GE’s new pocket-size Vscan  “ultra-smart ultrasound.”

About the size of a smart phone, theVscan houses powerful ultrasound technology that can potentially redefine the way doctors examine patients. By giving doctors a view into the body from the palm of a hand, GE says Vscan could one day become “as indispensable as the traditional physician’s stethoscope in patient exams.”

The company’s website says GE’s drive is to miniaturize technologies in order to make them more mobile, and GE has committed to developing 100 new innovations as part of its new $6 billion “healthymagination“  committment to developing 100 new medical innovations.

It certainly feels like we are entering a serious renaissance in the portability of medical instrumentation. In just the past year, I’ve met with numerous companies whose sole purpose is to use technology to do in the field what once could only be done in the laboratory. From infectious-disease detection to blood-flow monitoring, the cost-reduced portability of such devices could not come at a better time as our debate continues to rage around how to get our arms around skyrocketing medical expenses.

In his op-ed column, The Young and the Neuro, David Brooks writes that the attendees at last week’s Social and Affective Neuroscience Society conference were “young, hip and attractive.” These 30-something scholars from fields of psychology, economics, political science and beyond all have in common the hope that by looking into the brain they can help settle some old arguments about how people interact.

These folks are essentially trying to understand how social behavior changes biology as a complementary process to the way biology (genetics) directly influences behavior.

Brooks shares some great examples of research going on in this burgeoning field. These include perceptual studies of Arabs and Jews (how each perceive images of pain), Yankee and Red Sox fans watching baseball highlights (a look at how we process tribal dominance), and Americans and Japanese (reward structures of dominant versus subordinate behavior).

He concludes that “hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences.” This, he says, shines a bright light on “the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments.”

Medical device “Plug-and-Play” interoperability is a crucial issue today with the eventual goal being an integrated clinical environment, in which all devices are interconnected, in plug-and-play fashion, for better management. Most  medical devices used in hospitals don’t “talk” to each other in event the simpest of ways that our PCs “talk” to our printers!

Peter Szolovits, a professor of computer science at MIT who studies medical data integration says “where you have a bunch of data simultaneously, you can do a better job of trying to understand what’s going on with the patient.”

The issue is important enough for Mass General Hospital in Boston to have established the MD PnP program dedicated to “leading the adoption of open standards and technology to interconnect medical devices for improving patient safetyand healthcare efficiency.”

MD PnP is part of the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) and now the group has proposed a new set of standards for an”Integrated Clinical Environment.” Julian Goldman, director of MD PnP, calls the standards “a comprehensive [design] platform… that allows the global community to innovate and build cool things on top of it that improve patient safety.”