While some of its games and RROD’s can certainly get a gamer’s heart pumping, a former game developer for Rare has created a way to use Microsoft’s Xbox 360 to examine human hearts for defects.

Simon Scarle leveraged his extremely unique background of game development and electrocardio-dynamics research to modify a chip in the 360 so that it delivers electrical heart data instead of graphics.  The process results in the rendering of a model heart that allows doctors to see any defects or conditions, all this done five times faster and ten times cheaper than similar processes that require super computers reports Time.

Scarle, currently a computer scientist at the University of Warwick in England, told the magazine:

I can see this ... being most useful for students and early-career scientists to just quickly and cheaply grab that extra bit of computing power they otherwise wouldn't be able to get.