Health tech

An app developed by the UK Resuscitation Council may help doctors in emergency cardiac arrest situations, according to a study in the April issue of the journal Anaesthesia.

Researchers recruited 31 doctors (average age 27.5 years) who had taken advanced life-support training in the past four years to investigate whether the free app, called iResus, can improve test scores in simulated cardiac emergencies.

The doctors were divided into two groups--those who used iResus during the simulation and those who did not. Their knowledge and skills were evaluated using the CASTest scoring system during the simulated cardiac arrest emergency.

Those … Read more

Retired U.S. Navy sonar experts have helped create a novel portable device to detect, diagnose, and monitor strokes. The brain-imaging system uses a simple headset and laptop--and decades of submarine technology--to home in on brain activity that signifies trouble.

The headset is equipped with six highly sensitive accelerometers. Instead of peering out through the rounded bow of a submarine, they are oriented inward toward the brain.

The brain's machinations (veins expanding and contracting, aneurysms wobbling) each have their own unique vibrations that cause slight skull pulsations. The headset sensors measure these movements to look for irregular blood flow in much the same way submarines measure motion and generate signals that are processed, analyzed, and matched to objects.

Data on the type and location of brain vascular abnormalities is then rapidly sent to the PC.

"As sonar sorts out whales and other objects from vessels, the device sorts out cerebral abnormalities such as aneurysms, arteriovenous malformations (AVMs, an abnormal connection between veins and arteries), ischemic strokes, and traumatic brain injury from normal variations in physiology," said Dr. Kieran J. Murphy, director of research and deputy chief of radiology at the University of Toronto and University Health Network in Toronto, in a release (PDF).

Murphy is presenting trial data on the device--developed by Mountain View, Calif.-based Jan Medical--at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 36th Annual Scientific Meeting in Chicago this week. … Read more

Researchers from Harvard and MIT have designed a microfluidic device that uses porous "forests" of carbon nanotubes to detect individual cancer cells or viruses such as HIV in a blood sample.

Harvard's Mehmet Toner, MIT's Brian Wardle and colleagues improved upon a device developed four years ago that had forests of silicon posts to detect target cells.

By making the posts out of porous carbon nanotubes, which are cylinders of carbon atoms, and attaching various antibodies to them, sample fluid can flow through and around the "trees," increasing the chances of detection.

The antibodies will bond to targets chemically, but the device also works mechanically by trapping particles depending on the distance between the trees. The forest has 10 billion to 100 billion carbon nanotubes per square centimeter, and is 99 percent air. … Read more

Let's just get right to it: This is not an article about soft porn. Neither is this man trying to eat what appears to be a seafood pasta dish out of his partner's belly.

However ill-conceived this illustration may be, it is an entirely realistic prediction of body positions if the beltlike device around the pregnant woman's belly is actually giving this man a view of an unborn baby.

Called PreVue, the concept gadget comes to us via industrial designer Melody Shiue at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who just won a design award … Read more

Robot-assisted surgery to remove cancerous prostate glands is safe over the long term and has a major complication rate of less than 1 percent, according to research published by the journal European Urology.

An earlier study showed almost 87 percent of patients had no recurrence of cancer after five years, according to a release by the Henry Ford Health System. The procedure removes the entire prostate gland and some surrounding tissue.

Researchers followed 3,317 patients at the Vattikuti Urology Institute in Detroit from January 2005 to December 2009. The institute is known for the work of Dr. Mani Menon, … Read more

It's about time gyms started playing catch-up with our gadgets. No more should patrons have to argue over which episode of "Glee" to watch or which Beyonce album to blast. (Shoot, if it were up to me I'd run my heart out to the Sex Pistols while watching "Doctor Who," the combination of which would surely empty most gyms.)

A platform released as a separate add-on screen by Netpulse in 2010 may just help those of us who don't know what we want figure out how to get it. (OK, I'll stop … Read more

For centuries now, horses have been passed up by technology--forced to live in the shadows of manmade monstrosities like the train or the motorcar that add insult to injury by co-opting the name of their equine forebears with twisted phrases like "Iron Horse," "horsepower," and "Mustang GT."

Those dark times are coming to an end; the age of the bionic horse is upon us.

A miniature horse born sans much of his right leg was recently fitted with a nifty new prosthesis that makes him able to run like some sort of Lee Majors/Seabiscuit hybrid, except, uh...smaller.

When we first heard about this story, we naturally all had the same reaction: "We've gotta get on whatever health insurance plan that tiny horse has!"… Read more

The Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect has been put to its most imaginative use yet, and it's no game: saving lives. Surgeons and scientists are using the motion-sensing game controller in medical procedures and research, helping surgeons to operate and blind people to see.

The sawbones at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital are firing up the Kinect in the operating theater. No, they're not playing "Operation" while waiting for the anesthetic to kick in, but actually using it to view and manipulate medical imaging.

Read more of "Microsoft Kinect scrubs in to help surgeons operate and the blind see&… Read more

We're still not at the place where we can have real-time X-ray video like in "Total Recall," but that doesn't mean X-ray technology hasn't come a long way in the last 116 years.

To underline that point, researchers in the town of Maastricht in Holland have fired up an X-ray machine from 1895 and compared it with a modern machine.

As you can see in the photos to the right, things have gotten sharper. The original device was built by a local educator and doctor just weeks after the first "how to" on X-ray machines was published. It was found in a warehouse and then dusted off by researchers from Maastricht University Medical Center who wanted to show it off.

The old machine was originally produced and built in the Dutch town, and the team didn't just turn it on, they replicated as closely as possible the conditions that would have been available and used by doctors of that time.

But it's not just the better-looking images that make modern X-ray machines better, according to the BBC, but also the fact that they use 1,500 times less radiation, making them safer and cheaper. The machine wasn't just fired up for fun, but for science, by doctors who chronicle their findings in the journal Radiology.

Still, that doesn't mean that we can look down at the venerable old Dutch machine. If you hadn't been told that the image on the left came from a Victorian-era machine, would you have been able to tell? Probably not.… Read more