Half a century ago, in a film called "Fantastic Voyage", a tiny Raquel Welch and her team were sent into a dying patient's body in a nano-submarine to save his life. Technology has still not advanced quite that far, but today's sophisticated devices and diagnostics are getting ever closer.rnAt the university hospital in the German city of Aachen, near the border with Belgium and the Netherlands, complex heart surgery that would once have required a lengthy and costly hospital stay has been turned into a routine procedure. Harald Kuhl, a professor of cardiology at the hospital, says that patients who have been given heart-valve replacements in the morning are now usually back on their feet the same evening and discharged the next day.
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