Medical tools

A synthetic new gel made of water and the fibrous polymer acrylamide kick into gear the blood-clotting protein known as factor VII, thereby stanching blood flow from deep wounds in just minutes, report researchers from the University of Maryland in College Park.

"You just apply it to the surface of a wound," says Brendan Casey, a biomedical engineer at the university who began investigating polymeric hydrogels in 2007 and presented his latest findings from experiments on sheep at this week's American Chemical Society fall meeting.

Hydrogels are by no means novel, but many are made of biological … Read more

The Human-Robot Interaction Center at Japan's Saitama University is developing a wheelchair whose camera and laser sensor enable it to track--and follow--the person next to it.

The wheelchair, which is considered standard in all other respects, uses a distance sensor to determine which way the followed person's shoulders are facing so that it can change direction as the leader does.

"[Care] facilities sometimes don't have enough staff, so a single helper has to push two wheelchairs," a Saitama spokesperson says in a news report. "With wheelchairs like this, which can follow automatically, you can … Read more

They may have started with Atari or early Nintendo devices, but the majority of today's medical students grew up in a world with video games. "They are actually more comfortable in image-rich environments than with text," says Frederick Kron, a former medical educator and the president of Medical Cyberworlds.

And according to a survey of more than 200 medical students at the University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin at Madison, 77 percent say they would participate in a multiplayer online health care simulator if said simulator helped them accomplish an important goal.

Moreover, a whopping 98 … Read more

Removing the prostate during prostate cancer surgery can cause long-term sexual dysfunction in men who undergo the procedure. It is far too easy to damage the nerves necessary for erections and urinary continence.

But there are early signs that the carbon dioxide laser technology often used in surgery to treat head and neck cancers may reduce the risk of nerve damage in prostate cancer patients as well, according to research by urologic surgeons at the New York- Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center.

The results of the small, 10-patient pilot study--which used a new, flexible, fiber-based delivery system--appear in the July issue … Read more

In development for more than five years, WellDoc's DiabetesManager System has just received the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's 510(k) clearance to be marketed to health care providers and adult patients with type 2 diabetes, the company announced.

A mobile health system, DiabetesManager will offer automated clinical coaching based on real-time patient data, enabling patients and health care professionals to set parameters and manage the disease outside of office visits.

WellDoc announced that it intends to commercially launch the system in early 2011, and will be an exhibitor in the inaugural Mobile Health Pavilion at the … Read more

A new sniff-sensing controller out of Israel may enable the severely paralyzed to navigate wheelchairs, surf the Net, and communicate in writing via controlled inhalations and exhalations.

The system, being developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, employs a sensor that fits in a nostril's opening and measures changes in air pressure. A pressure transducer translates this information into electrical signals, which are transmitted to a computer, and its specialized software, via USB connection. Patients on respirators use a passive version of the device that diverts airflow to their nostrils.

Researchers tested the system on 96 healthy volunteers and 10 quadriplegics, with promising results. Some users, the team says, were able to navigate an electric wheelchair around a complex path or play a computer game with nearly the speed and accuracy of a mouse or joystick (watch the video below to see a demonstration of the wheelchair in action).

While the system can be made to work with a variety of sniffs (long or short, strong or shallow), researchers employed a simple sniff code for their tests: A "double sniff in" implied "forward;" a "double sniff out" implied backward; a successive "sniff out then in" implied left; and a successive "sniff in then out" implied right.

Using incremental signals (a "left" command turned the chair left, another "left" command turned it farther left) volunteers navigated wheelchairs indoors and outdoors, with the most complicated maneuvers, executed both by healthy and quadriplegic volunteers, being sharp turns.

The scientists were particularly encouraged by tests conducted on three patients with Locked-In-Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder in which cognitive function remains unimpaired, but all voluntary muscles are paralyzed, except for those that control eye movement. The condition was famously portrayed in the 2007 film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," which told the true story of a journalist with Locked-In who dictated his memoir through eye blinks alone.

Sniffing is a precise motor skill controlled in part by the soft palate, the flexible divider that moves to direct air in or out through the mouth or nose. Because the soft palate is controlled by nerves that connect to it directly through the braincase, the Weizmann team built on its theory that control over soft palate movement might stay intact even in the most acute cases of paralysis.

Using the sniffing system to control a computer cursor, the Locked-In testers were--after considerable practice--able to communicate with family members, said Noam Sobel, a Weizmann Institute professor of neurobiology who developed the system with electronics engineers Anton Plotkin and Aharon Weissbrod, and research student Lee Sela. "Some wrote poignant messages to their loved ones, sharing with them, for the first time in a very long time, their thoughts and feelings," he said. … Read more

Are you dreading upgrading your graphics processor yet again just so you can get lost in the alien-infested urban jungle of Crysis 2? Rest assured that the immersive power of these state-of-the-art video processors is now being used for more than just visual pleasure.

A new technique for processing X-rays appears to lower the radiation patients are exposed to during cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) scans by a factor of 10 or more, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego.

The research is being presented this week at the American Association of Physicists in Medicine's 52nd annual meeting in Philadelphia.

Lead author Xun Jia, a UCSD postdoctoral fellow, based his team's work on recent advances in compressed sensing by developing a CT reconstruction algorithm for graphics processing unit platforms (GPU cards being used for 3D computer graphics, often in video games), thereby increasing computational efficiency to reconstruct a cone beam CT scan in just minutes.… Read more

A patch comprising hundreds of microscopic needles that dissolve into the skin could enable laypeople to administer vaccines not only easily but also painlessly, according to new research out of Georgia Tech and Emory University.

The patch contains roughly an array made of poly-vinyl pyrrolidone with 100 needles that are just 650 microns long. Once pressed into the skin, the microneedles immediately begin to dissolve in bodily fluids, and only the water-soluble backing remains. (Because the backing alone contains nothing sharp, it can simply be thrown away.)

The patches were studied on mice, and the results appeared online in the journal Nature Medicine. … Read more

An emerging technology called Lab-on-Bead could cut years off drug development time, according to new research to be published in the September/October issue of the Journal of Molecular Recognition.

Lab-on-Bead is a diagnostics tool that essentially decorates tiny beads--so small that roughly 1,000 of them could fit across a human hair--with pins designed to join the DNA bar codes of drugs to matching diseases. This process enables researchers to match drugs to diseases in a single step, speeding up drug discovery by up to 10,000 times, the team reports.

"There are an infinite number of possibilities … Read more