Imaging tech

Magnetic nanoparticles target human cancer cells

In 2008, scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Ovarian Cancer Institute developed a potential treatment to fight cancer using magnetic nanoparticles designed to attach themselves to cancer cells. They found in their groundbreaking tests on mice that the particles not only attached to cancer cells, but they also moved those cells.

In what may well prove to be some of the most exciting health news in the year to come, the group announced in the journal Nanomedicine in December and further publicized on Tuesday that it has replicated the study on human cancer cells, with the nanoparticles … Read more

Breakthrough heart scan leads to early diagnosis

Magnetometers are typically associated with large-scale projects such as digging for oil, locating submerged objects, and detecting archaeological sites from spacecraft. But now, with unprecedented sensitivity to magnetic fluctuations, a prototype being developed at the University of Leeds could greatly improve the diagnosis of cardiac conditions.

"The new system gets round previous difficulties by putting the actual detector in its own magnetic shield," says University of Leeds Professor Ben Varcoe, who is leading the research team.

Using a magnetometer to examine the cardiovascular health of humans has, up until now, been expensive and complicated, and has required containing … Read more

Diagnosing PTSD using brain imaging

Post-traumatic stress, which is estimated to afflict one in five veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone, is typically diagnosed through behavioral screenings and is often considered a "soft" disorder with no known biomarkers.

"It's like depression in that it can be hidden by the sufferer, it can be latent, and it can be re-activated," says Apostolos Georgopoulos, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. "That's a major issue for the Army, which has to decide whether to re-deploy troops who have had it."

Georgopoulos has previously discovered biomarkers … Read more

Want to be a better gamer? Size matters

If you'd like to know whether you're a natural video gamer, just measure the volume of three structures in your brain, according to a new study conducted by several research institutions at the University of Illinois.

Research has already shown that expert gamers outperform novices across several measures of attention and perception, while other studies have found that training novices on video games for 20-plus hours rarely results in measurable cognitive benefits--a contradiction that suggests that brain structure itself, not training, could predict gaming abilities, according to the study.

"This is the first time that we've … Read more

Video Scout: For surgeons or James Bond?

We've come a long way, baby.

Back when the first endoscope was developed in 1806 to probe "the canals and cavities of the human body," the Vienna Medical Society ruled it to be something of an inappropriate technology, and improvements on such devices were slow-going for decades.

Today the field of endoscopy has splintered out into dozens of areas, playing key roles in procedures that involve almost every part of the human body, from colonoscopies (colon) to rhinoscopies (nose), colposcopies (cervix) to bronchoscopies (airways). The tiny cameras used in these procedures make David Pogue's column look like a review of ancient relics.

At just 3 millimeters in diameter, BC Tech's Video Scout is one of the smallest medical cameras in the world, according to the company's VP of business development, Charlie Skinner:

Medical companies can integrate the Video Scout into biopsy tools, ablation wands, catheters, tissue cutters, scopes and more. We're confident this sort of low cost imaging technology will usher in a new wave of disposable medical products with built in video cameras.

The high cost of health care has led to a big push for more affordable surgical devices. Video Scout has great potential to be a low-cost, single-use alternative to more expensive industry standards. CEO Ben Clawson takes the upside even further:… Read more

Diagnosing autism with MEG imaging

Because children with autism spectrum disorders tend to process sound and language a fraction of a second slower than children without the disorders, researchers have discovered that measuring magnetic signals that mark this kind of delayed response has the potential to become a standardized tool for diagnosing autism.

"More work needs to be done before this can become a standard tool, but this pattern of delayed brain response may be refined into the first imaging biomarker for autism," said Dr. Timothy P.L. Roberts, vice chairman of Radiology Research at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and head … Read more

Can full-body airport scanners harm you?

Since explosive materials were sneaked onto a U.S. domestic flight on Christmas Day, full-body scanning machines are far more likely to make their way to security lines at your local airport, even though they might not have detected said materials.

While the Transportation Security Administration already has 40 such devices in place, it just bought 150 to be placed in U.S. airports and says it plans to buy 300 more (they go for $170,000 apiece). On Wednesday, the Netherlands announced that these scanners would be used on passengers for all flights out of Amsterdam to the U.… Read more

Can we diagnose and destroy cancer in one sitting?

Let's say you find a lump somewhere and decide to go in for an exam. And let's say there was a little box to check that allows you to get a shot that targets and kills cancerous cells right then and there, no surgery, no waiting, and possibly no radiation or chemo therapy down the road. Would you check the box?

Since time matters when it comes to cancer, the creation of a single nanoparticle--traceable in real time via MRI--that tags and zaps cancer cells all in one procedure has a team of researchers raising their eyebrows in … Read more

Radiologists rally behind imaging app OsiriX

Just over a year ago, the open-source Mac image viewer OsiriX released its widely hailed medical imaging software for the iPhone. The software was created by a group of radiologists who also proved to be sophisticated programmers, and was hailed by a wider net of radiologists as an app with serious promise.

More recently, scientists from Johns Hopkins University rallied formally behind the app when they presented the results of a study conducted at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville of patients suspected of having acute appendicitis. Reviewing nothing more than computed tomography (CT) scans over an encrypted wireless network using an iPhone 3G with the OsiriX app, researchers were able to diagnose acute appendicitis correctly in 99 percent of the scans of 25 patients, with one false negative.

"This new technology can expedite diagnosis and, therefore, treatment," says Asim Choudhri, a neuroradiologist at JHU who led the study. "We knew that recent advances in handheld device technology allowed viewing of medical imaging, but it [was] unproven whether viewing on a small screen allows a reader to reliably and reproducibly obtain information."

The findings of this study, which Choudhri tells me was funded internally at the UVA Department of Radiology (and yes, his allegiance is clear--he owns an iPhone and in fact supplied it for the study) are encouraging not only for possible appendicitis cases, but a wide range of illnesses such as aneurism and stroke that require fast diagnosis.… Read more