Star Trek and Medical Computers

You may not be surprised to know that I'm a Star Trek fan. I'm not a super-serious fan, but I'm also a bit more than your average fan. Anyways, I love the medical gadgets that appear in science fiction films. I often wonder if we'll see tablet PCs that are thin and light like the ones that appear on Star Trek. Maybe the color touch-screen Amazon Kindle will be the closest thing to the type of small tablet that's seen in science fiction movies.

The medical tricorder is seen in Star Trek as a handheld computer that scans people and immediate provides a diagnosis. We now have handheld ultrasound probes. You can even plug EKG leads to a handheld PDA (running the Palm OS or Windows Mobile). Will we see something like the tricorder in our lifetime?