The earlier visit to RCMN of Brains4Design, on June 24 2015, was arranged by PP Chris from Abidjan. PP Chris has a special connection with MRI diagnosis as it helped to save his life some years earlier after a head injury. “It’s a good thing I was in Metro Manila at the time”, he said. Now, the new technology can potentially extend such life-saving diagnoses much more easily in more remote places.

We learned about life in Cote d’Ivoire, the host country of the African Development Bank. From being a country “like Singapore in the sixties”, life is harder now with high prices and tribal conflicts. PP Chris is now in transit to a new job in Washington DC with the World Bank, starting in April. Happily, he intends to maintain his membership of RCMN, a fixed spot in his changing world.

Jens Pattberg, with his Brains4Design colleagues Christoph Hoynck, Nori Kim and Marcus Burri is again touring Asia to prepare for the production and marketing the medical diagnostic device STX Scanner. As many of us know from experience, diagnostic procedures involving images (X-rays, as we used to call them) were not so accurate and can be expensive. Today we are also familiar with Computer Technology (CT) Scans, X-ray radiology and MRI diagnostic scans and how much they cost. The STX-Scanner, a combination of these technologies, can be a major advance, particularly for provincial hospitals and health centers, by enabling mobile in-the-field MRI diagnoses, particularly of injuries, leading to prompt and targeted treatment, all at much less cost than at present.

We hope and expect to see more of PP Chris and Brains4Design. Both have much potential for

establishing connections which will make for new and exciting projects for our club..