Another progression by the time we got to Voyager was the emergency holographic medical program.

The holodoctor is another innovation that was first seen on Star Trek: Voyager. Basically, the idea is that if you lose your ship�s surgeon and staff, you might be able to call upon a programme that would generate a hologram. The hologram would be animated with force fields so that it could hold instruments, scanners, laser scalpels or whatever tools he might be using.

That idea of holograms takes its cue from the fact that today we�re developing expert systems - databases that you can ask relatively intelligent questions of about medical issues. They�re getting to the point where they�re almost as good as somebody who is fresh out of medical school. Not as good as an experienced physician, but a lot of medical knowledge can be codified and put in to a computer program. If you design the architecture of the program well enough, you can draw logical conclusions from sets of symptoms and rule out certain kinds of illnesses and describe the likelihood of others.

I remember when my uncle, who was a surgeon, first saw the holographic doctor. He said; 'Oh great, now I�m going to be replaced by a computer.' Fortunately he was thinking about retiring anyway. Expert systems is another recent development in computer technology that we knew we would have to think about as we designed our technologies for Voyager and the holographic doctor is sort of the ultimate expert medical system.