Is There Anything A Smart Phone Can't Do?

video h/t MJ Perry
The ultrasound app for smart phones allows you to act as your own diagnostician. It is very useful for diagnosing vascular blockages, abdominal cysts, and obstetrical conditions. Highly recommended by Al Fin ultrasonographers.

More uses for smart phones and pads, adapted from a posting at Al Fin the Next Level:

Wired
Hand held devices are commonly used for media play, reading, web search and email, telephoning, as cameras, for playing games, etc. But hand held electronics devices can provide a wide range of functions that are more serious. The oscilloscope device pictured above is a serious instrument, useful for both hobbyists and researchers.

Let me start out by stating that this [oscilloscope] doesn’t actually compare to the high-end models as far as sampling and bandwidth. You won’t use the iMSO-104 for extremely high-speed, GHz-frequency signal applications. Honestly, for home maker use, I don’t see this being an issue for a long time. Oscium provided a scope for my review and before it even arrived I thought of my list of features to look for and try out. So what were some of the things that I was looking for in using the scope? First, being based on an iOS device, I was looking for a simple and navigable interface. Check. The scope plots zoom just as you would expect with the common iOS finger pinches and spreads. The traces are easy to drag up and down as you would expect as are the measurement cursors. Measurement cursors! That was another item! In the video linked above, Collin shows how you can make measurements on an old CRT scope using the time per division and volts per division selection and visual cues. On some of the digital scopes I have used, you could bring up a cursor that would give you the time or voltage between the points. This scope includes those cursors and if you know what I am talking about it is just as easy to use and intuitive as you think. If you don’t: trust me, it is very intuitive.

The Oscium scope can also do all of those things you would expect from any scope: triggering, running measurements, the ability to freeze the display, screen shot, data capture, e-mail, and configuration saving. The unit supports a single analog probe and four digital probes, all included in the kit. You can run all five inputs at one time or select any combination to show. _Wired

Hand held iOS devices can also be used as scientific microscopes, EEG imaging devices, neurofeedback devices, and for a wide range of other instrumentation uses. iPads are even being used in hospital operating rooms to help surgeons to zero in on target lesions.

More unusual smartphone apps

Smart phones and pads are just beginning to be integrated into the everyday activities that humans pursue. The imagination is the limiting factor. Expect the market for imagination-expanding smart phone apps to begin heating up any minute now.

Synthetic HDL Cholesterol Sponge: Nanotechnology Making Cholesterol Safer

The nano-synthesis of biologically active molecules has a huge future in biomedicine. One example of such a synthetic biomolecule is synthetic HDL cholesterol, recently synthesised by Northwestern University scientists.

The researchers successfully designed synthetic HDL and show that their nanotechnology version is capable of irreversibly binding cholesterol. The synthetic HDL, based on gold nanoparticles, is similar in size to HDL and mimics HDL’s general surface composition. The study is published online by the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).

“We have designed and built a cholesterol sponge. The synthetic HDL features the basics of what a great cholesterol drug should be,” said Chad A. Mirkin, George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, professor of medicine and professor of materials science and engineering. Mirkin and Shad Thaxton, M.D., assistant professor of urology in Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, led the study. _Nanowerk

A previous use of synthetic HDL cholesterol is as a tracer molecule, to identify atherosclerotic plaque inside arterial lining. Tagging the synthetic HDL with likely MRI contrast agents such as gadolinium allowed for the rapid location and size estimate of cholesterol plaques.

"It's like a smart bomb that goes directly to the plaque," says Fayad. "We were able to see plaque in high contrast."

In their images, the team also detected accumulations of macrophages--killer cells that invade areas of injury or inflammation such as plaque buildup. These macrophages secrete enzymes that Fayad says "eat up" plaque, making it unstable and more likely to rupture, which in turn could lead to heart attacks. Being able to detect these cells early on could help identify people at high risk of heart disease, as well as help develop treatments and lifestyle changes before their condition worsens. _Medgadget

More on using nano-synthetic HDL to aid in diagnostic testing for atherosclerosis here.

I Wish I'd Had This When I Worked in Emergency

High contrast X-rays that give more bone detail, and more soft tissue detail as well? I'll take it--and so would any other physician who ever worked through long busy ER nights. The ER doc (and all physicians) has to make quick decisions based on very limited information. Anything that makes the job easier is fine with me.

Swiss researchers have demonstrated the practicality of a new high-resolution x-ray imaging technique that reveals fine structures that are invisible using conventional techniques. Dark-field x-ray imaging can be used to generate highly detailed images of bones and to distinguish between substances that look identical in conventional x-ray images, such as explosives and cheese. The researchers are now investigating whether their approach might also increase the resolution of medical imaging techniques such as mammograms and computed-tomography (CT) scans.

Tech Review

CT scans work differently, but if they can get dark field x-ray to work with CT, it could speed up diagnosis of several types of potentially life-threatening emergencies.

"Small structures like micro-cracks show up nicely in these images because they scatter radiation quite a bit," says Pfeiffer. This suggests that the images could be useful for detecting osteoporosis or for finding flaws in mechanical structures such as turbines.

"Edges and boundaries are more clear in the dark-field images," says Elizabeth Brainerd, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University, who uses x-rays to study the biomechanics of bones. It can be difficult to distinguish small bones and joints in conventional x-rays. Brainerd agrees that dark-field images could be useful for detecting small fractures and bone spurs in patients, and she's excited about the possibility of extending Pfeiffer's technique to three-dimensional CT scans.

Better tools for better information, to make better decisions possible.

Image tip Next Energy

Focused Energy Beam Surgery

Remember Dr. McCoy's diatribe against 20th century medicine in Star Trek IV "The Voyage Home(1986)"? Using focused energy beams, some surgeries may avoid the scalpels and suture that McCoy hated so much.

High-intensity focused ultrasound is now being investigated for a number of different treatments. It promises "bloodless surgery" with no scalpels or sutures in sight. Doctors would pass a sensor over the patient and use invisible rays to heal the wound. Researchers are exploring the use of high-intensity focused ultrasound - with beams tens of thousands of times more powerful than used in imaging - for applications ranging from numbing pain to destroying cancerous tissue.

..."You can penetrate deep into the body and deliver the energy to the bleeding very accurately," Vaezy said. Recent tests on pigs' lungs showed that high-intensity ultrasound sealed the leaks in one or two minutes. More than 95 percent of the 70 incisions were stable after two minutes of treatment, according to results published this summer in the Journal of Trauma.

The findings suggest that ultrasound might replace what is now a painful, invasive procedure. Lung injuries are relatively common because the chest is a big surface that's often exposed to crushing or puncture wounds, said co-author Gregory Jurkovich, chief of trauma at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and a UW professor of surgery. A busy trauma room like Harborview's, he said, admits about two patients with bleeding lungs per day.

...The new research shows that in these difficult cases, high-intensity focused ultrasound applied from outside could stop bleeding and air leaks. Vaezy and colleagues in the Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound in the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory have been developing ultrasound for surgery for more than a decade, concentrating on frequencies in the 1000 to 10,000 hertz (cycles per second). The device producing the ultrasound rays, about the size of a golf ball, is inserted into a handle that doctors use to scan the outside of the body. Previous experiments used the tool to seal blood vessels and stop bleeding in the spleen.

..."Doctors will scan the body from the outside, recognize where the injury is, focus the beam on the injury and use the beams to seal the wound," Jurkovich said. The futuristic medical technology's promise is substantial, he said. "It would be non-invasive and it would stop the bleeding from the outside. When it happens, that's going to revolutionize how we would care for some of these injuries."

Source

Not really so far from the scanner wand and medical tricorder, eh?

Neurofeedback: Will We Have to Wait for Video Games to Bring it to Us?

Will we have to wait for video games that incorporate neurofeedback, before this useful tool becomes commonplace and readily available?

The imaging company Omneuron wants to bring fMRI neurofeedback to the public, to aid in treating chronic pain.

But Dr. deCharms says that controlling pain is just one of many possible uses for fMRI feedback. Today, Omneuron is also researching treatments for addiction, depression and other psychological illnesses. In addition, he said. the company has contemplated “several dozen applications,” including the treatment of stroke and epilepsy. Brain scanning could even be used to improve athletic performance, he speculated.

Doctors and drug-abuse experts are particularly excited about the idea of treating addiction using fMRI. While scientists have talked about such an application since the technology was invented, Omneuron is the first to work on a real therapy. “We might have a tool to help control the inner sensation of craving,” said Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped fund Omneuron’s research into addiction.

A growing number of ventures hope to turn fMRI into a business. The most well-publicized is No Lie MRI, which wants to sell brain scanning to law firms and governmental bodies like police departments or security and intelligence agencies as a replacement for the notoriously unreliable polygraph test. No Lie MRI has already begun selling what it calls its truth verification technology for about $10,000 to individuals keen to prove their innocence.

Source

But these companies have to get past government regulatory agencies first. But the government is not the only obstacle to the widespread use of the promising constellation of technologies referred to as neurofeedback. EEG neurofeedback has been around for decades, and the potentials for this therapeutic modality are still being nibbled at around the edges.

It's not unusual to walk into Desney Tan's Microsoft Research office and find him wearing a red and blue electroencephalography (EEG) cap, white wires cascading past his shoulders. Tan spends his days looking at a monitor, inspecting and modifying the mess of squiggles that approximate his brain's electrical activity. He is using algorithms to sort through and make sense of EEG data in hopes of turning electrodes into meaningful input devices for computers, as common as the mouse and keyboard.

The payoff, he says, will be technology that improves productivity in the workplace, enhances video-game play, and simplifies interactions with computers. Ultimately, Tan hopes to develop a mass-market EEG system consisting of a small number of electrodes that, affixed to a person's head, communicate wirelessly with software on a PC.

...Tan expects the technology to be used initially as a controller for video games, since gamers are accustomed to "strapping on new devices," he says. In fact, next year a company called Emotiv Systems, based in San Francisco, plans to offer an EEG product that controls certain aspects of video games. However, the company will not discuss the specifics of its technology, and there isn't widespread consensus on the feasibility and accuracy of the approach.

The true challenge, Tan says, will be to make EEG interfaces simple enough for the masses. He and his team are working on minimizing the number of electrodes, finding a semisolid material as an alternative to the conductive gel, and developing wireless electrodes. A mass-market product could be many years away. But if Tan succeeds, getting a computer to read your thoughts could be as easy as putting on a Bluetooth headset.

Source

To keep up on some of the latest news on neurofeedback, check this link occasionally.

The EEG Spectrum newsletter comes out fairly regularly, and is another place to check for technology upgrades.

This link is another place for good information on neurofeedback.

Electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and real time fMRI, are different technologies that provide fast enough response for feedback purposes. Neurofeedback is vastly underused in Psychiatry, Psychology, Pain Control, recovery from brain injury, and other areas of medicine and mental health. Applications to sports training and personal coaching should be obvious.

A video search on Google Video, etc. will provide a large number of videos dealing with neurofeedback and other biofeedback technologies.

Certainly if you know anyone with disabling migraines, or with a child with ADD/ADHD, you should let them know about neurofeedback.

Sometimes it seems as if videogames and simulated worlds such as Second Life are driving a lot of business and technology in the real world. Neurofeedback may be yet another example of this.

Where Was This Stethoscope When I Was In Medical School?

Israeli researchers have devised a non-invasive method of lung imaging called Vibration Response Imaging (VRI).

Kushnir has developed a new technology called Vibration Response Imaging (VRI) that measures energy generated in the lungs and analyzes it to diagnose conditions such as asthma, pneumonia, and lung tumors. On July 23, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted Kushnir's Israeli startup company, Deep Breeze Ltd., approval to begin marketing a VRI device in the U.S. This comes on the heels of earlier approvals in Israel, the European Union, and South Korea.

...Kushnir's process, which uses no radiation, works by analyzing acoustic vibrations given off by the lungs. As a patient breathes normally for several seconds, sensors placed on the back—in effect, electronic stethoscopes—pick up these lung vibrations and feed them to a computer, where they're processed and turned into vivid images. Conditions such as asthma, emphysema, and pneumonia each produce distinct and definable images.

"In a matter of mere seconds, a doctor using the technology can ascertain an enormous amount of information about the lung that would ordinarily take hours and require the use of several devices," says Kushnir.

Source

This is but one more small step toward Dr. McCoy's hand held total body scanner wand, from Star Trek.

Non-invasive scanning technology has completely changed the practise of emergency medicine over the past two decades. More and more of the guesswork is being taken out of diagnosing possible life or death emergencies. Better monitoring of patients in the OR and ICU is now possible, thanks to improved transducer technologies.

Should we make a big deal from the fact that this is yet one more in a long line of intriguing inventions from Israel? I am inclined to say "yes, we should." The fact that these inventions are coming from Israel and not Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and other autocratic dictatorships and theocracies should give anyone who defends those hellholes (while attacking Israel) pause.

A number of western leftists and muslims would like to turn Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US into copycat versions of one of that list of prison-nations. It is probably too late for all but the youngest of them to wake up and face reality, but the rest of us can choose for ourselves.

MRI-Safe Robot Can Take Guided Biopsies During Imaging

Most robotic motors are electromagnetic--so they are excluded from the MRI chamber. If you want an MRI-guided robot to work on a patient during the MRI procedure, you have to try a different type of motor. The pneumatic stepper motor--controlled by optical fibre--is an obvious fit.

“Lots of biopsies on organs such as the prostate are currently performed blind because the tumors are typically invisible to the imaging tools commonly used,” says Dan Stoianovici, Ph.D., an associate professor of urology at Johns Hopkins and director of the robotics lab. “Our new MRI-safe motor and robot can target the tumors. This should increase accuracy in locating and collecting tissue samples, reduce diagnostic errors and also improve therapy.”

A description of the new motor, made entirely out of plastics, ceramics and rubber, and driven by light and air, was published in the February issue of the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechanotronics.

The challenge for his engineering team was to overcome MRI’s dependence on strong magnetic interference. Metals are unsafe in MRIs because the machine relies on a strong magnet, and electric currents distort MR images, says Stoianovici. The team used six of the motors to power the first-ever MRI-compatible robot to access the prostate gland. The robot currently is undergoing preclinical testing.

“Prostate cancer is tricky because it only can be seen under MRI, and in early stages it can be quite small and easy to miss,” says Stoianovici.

The new Johns Hopkins motor, dubbed PneuStep, consists of three pistons connected to a series of gears. The gears are turned by air flow, which is in turn controlled by a computer located in a room adjacent to the MRI machine. “We’re able to achieve precise and smooth motion of the motor as fine as 50 micrometers, finer than a human hair,” says Stoianovici.

The robot goes alongside the patient in the MRI scanner and is controlled remotely by observing the images on the MR. The motor is rigged with fiber optics, which feeds information back to the computer in real time, allowing for both guidance and readjustment.

Source

Such electricity-free motors should be useful in other areas where the absence of magnetism and electricity are important.

I am not thrilled at the prospect of a pneumo-robot creeping around my nether regions, snipping and stabbing--particularly within the confines of a mega-magnetic tube. Fortunately, by the time I am ready for such things, robots will be nano-sized and MRI will by superseded by gentler imaging techniques.

Hat tip medgadget

In Search of Dr. McCoy's Scanner Wand

Medical imaging in the Star Trek world was far advanced over anything available today. Even so, there are some amazing developments in medical imaging that promise even better technologies in the near future.

This Newswise newsrelease reports on advanced software developed at BYU in Utah, to allow physicians to "call up" 3-dimensional images of any part of a patient's anatomy, from a CT scan, MRI scan, or similar data:

The tool, dubbed “Live Surface” by its creators BYU professor William Barrett and graduate student Chris Armstrong, also has special-effects applications – in similar fashion it can be used to extract a single actor’s performance or inanimate objects from video clips.

“The main goal in developing Live Surface was to give the physician a powerful, practical tool that can be used interactively,” said Barrett, explaining that existing software and techniques that are used to give doctors a look at a patient’s anatomy are either too simplistic or take too long to be of immediate use. “A program like this has to be incredibly fast and very interactive, or else it’s very frustrating for the user, who currently has to go get a sandwich and come back before he has what he wants.”

Live Surface has the additional benefit of allowing users to easily isolate “tricky” anatomy such as soft tissue – blood vessels, hearts and muscles – that a lot of other techniques can’t readily extract, said Barrett.

“The hard stuff (meaning bones) is easy to see using traditional methods, but even there, the simpler techniques sometimes overestimate, underestimate, or fuse joints, whereas Live Surface neatly and accurately separates them,” said Barrett. “Our program also provides more robust isolation of soft tissue, which is quite a breakthrough.”

The BYU software works by extracting information from data collected in 3-D volumes – CT scans, MRIs or 3-D ultrasounds. With a click and drag of the mouse, a user identifies the object he wishes to extract. Next, he identifies those portions of the data that surround the object. Immediately, the desired object is extracted from the data.

“This is the object I want, and this is not the object I want. And in less than half a second, it pulls the object you want out of the data,” said Armstrong, who will present the computer science research behind Live Surface at the International Workshop on Volume Graphics 31 in Boston. “It’s really that simple.”

....After a surgeon had extracted a 3-D image of a person’s heart or brain, for example, the image could then be projected onto the patient’s body, fitted to create a road map for the surgeon as he operated. Additionally, doctors could use the tool to make better diagnoses after visualizing a patient’s organs from multiple angles or do a better job of locating cancerous tumors.

Research for the software was partially funded by Adobe, makers of the popular image-editing program Photoshop. Barrett’s lab has had a long-running relationship with Adobe – Live Surface builds on Barrett’s development of Intelligent Scissors, a program that allows users to quickly pull 2-D objects out of images. The program, renamed “magnetic lasso,” was incorporated into 5.0 and subsequent versions of Photoshop and is used by millions of designers, artists and photographers.

Source.

It is easy to see how this technology would allow a surgeon to "practice" a procedure on a specific individual, using virtual surgery techniques combined with a CT scan or MRI scan of the involved part of the body. Difficult procedures could be stored in software libraries for training surgical residents.

Similar technology is being used to perform virtual colonoscopies, to substitute for the lengthy and uncomfortable screening procedure of colonoscopy using an endoscope. Eventually, a whole body scan might become quick enough, easy enough, and inexpensive enough to provide regular and reliable medical screening for individuals whose genetic tests indicate they are at increased risk.

Peeping Toms of Neuroscience: No More Secrets

We are fortunate these days, to have available the expertise of legions of neuroscientists, all for the price of a mouse click. Eide Neurolearning Blog reports on the obvious neuro-image differences in brain activity between the pro golfer and the beginning golfer.
This fMRI image taken from ScienceDaily, illustrates sex or gender differences in the amount of gray and white matter used for general intelligence.
While there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, a UC Irvine study has found significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence.

The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance.

“These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and longtime human intelligence researcher, who led the study with colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico. “In addition, by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain.”

Functional MRI, or fMRI, is a powerful imaging technology that looks inside the brain while it works. Not only will it tell you what part of the brain is working at any given time, it will also give you an idea of how hard that part of the brain is working.

This excellent article discusses the use of fMRI in intelligence studies, and has some incredible graphic images. The thoughtful sensitivity of the authors when discussing societal implications of the research, and necessary ethical concerns of researchers, is encouraging. And if that masterful review only served to whet your appetite for more, consult these neural correlates of reasoning.

The human brain sits exposed. If the person lies, his brain will show a different picture than if he tells the truth. If the person has to work harder to solve a problem than his sister did, his brain image will give him away. It is getting harder to hide from the peeping Toms of neuroscience.

Exposing the Brain

Hat tip to both Develintel and Intelligence Testing blogs, for pointing me to this useful download for teaching the neuroanatomy of the brain. Brain Voyager Brain Tutor is a free download educational program with great visuals, that lets you look at the brain, and slices of the brain, from different angles and vantage points.

Here is the description from the website:

BrainVoyager Brain Tutor is an educational program that teaches knowledge about the human brain the easy way. The program lets you interactively explore high-quality 3D head and brain models, which can be rotated, moved and zoomed in real-time. The head and brain models have been computed with BrainVoyager QX using data from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Besides having fun with the rotatable 3D models, the program contains information about the major lobes, gyri and sulci of the cerebral cortex, which are revealed in color simply by clicking on a part of the brain. The next release of BV Brain Tutor will also contain Brodman areas and brain regions revealed by functional MRI.

BrainVoyager Brain Tutor runs on all major computer platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The Mac version of BV Brain Tutor recently won the runner-up prize for the Best Original Qt Application developed with the commercial Qt license in Trolltech's Qt/Mac Application Developer Contest. BV Brain Tutor can be freely downloaded here.



Both Develintel and Intelligence Testing have some good posts up recently. Go over and check them out.

Workings of the Brain

Chris at Develintel Blog posts on "Selection Efficiency and Inhibition." The brain must constantly choose between alternative interpretations of sensory input or other parallel mental activities. Why does the brain choose one interpretation and inhibit others?
It is an interesting question. Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained and before that Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind dealt with this issue. Doug Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, touched more tangentially on the same idea.

The Eide Neurolearning Blog presents and interesting look at the difference in neural imaging of direct self-reflection (thinking about yourself) and reflected self-reflection (thinking about what you think others are thinking about you). The phenomenon of a person being "without a soul", or put another way, without a sense of self, is related to this concept. Can a person be so immersed in what he thinks others are thinking about him, that he never builds an inner sense of who he is?