People affected with hearing impairment frequently experience emotional conflicts, isolation and depression due to inability to hear voice coming through telephone, more specifically when using the Internet Protocol for voice over internet communications. Using conventional hearing aid and cochlear implants does not solve this problem because increasing the volume of voice coming through internet telephony also increases background noises.

Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology has now developed next generation digital hearing aid solution, known as Speech-Improved Telephony. This technology uses algorithms to compensate for those sound frequencies which are detected by patient with greater difficulty. It amplifies the softer sound frequencies to make it more easily detectable by hearing impaired patient, without intensifying the louder sound frequencies. These algorithm parameters can be adjusted by patient himself in a user-friendly manner according to his own specific hearing frequency disability.  To make this technology more user friendly, these algorithms can be integrated into all commonly used devices like iPod Touch system, telephone system or audio conferencing system.

During the knee implant procedure, damaged and worn out weight bearing surfaces of the bone are replaced by implant made of clinical grade titanium. The lifespan of such implant depends on how well the titanium implant surface is able to integrate with the bone.

Normally such implants have a life span of about 15 years after which risk of loosening of implant or wear of implant increases significantly. According to available statistics, about 20 million Americans of age above 45 years are affected by osteoarthritis. It can be inferred that patients of age group 45 years to 60 years may have to undergo second surgery to replace the first implant after using the first implant for about 15 years.

According to the research done at Georgia Institute of Technology, it may no longer be necessary to undergo a second surgery to replace the first implant after 15 years.

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have developed new improved titanium implants for knee replacement whose surface is coated by three or five self-assembled tethered clusters of the engineered fibronectin protein. This coating by clusters of fibronectin protein at the nanoscale level helps to promote bone formation around the implant, resulting in implant to be fixed twice as securely as compared to implants made from bare titanium. This coating helps to significantly increase the life span of an implant procedure much beyond 15 years period.

Source:  Journal Science Translational Medicine.

Vitrectomy

Bausch + Lomb have now introduced the new, Stellaris(r) PC (Procedural Choice) Vision Enhancement System to eye surgeons.  This system has been named PC (Procedural Choice) Vision Enhancement System because it gives choice to the eye surgeon to perform vitrectomy or cataract surgery in a single compact system using most advanced technology.

This Stellaris(r) PC Vision Enhancement System has an innovative design with wireless foot pedal which allows it to occupy less space. It can be quickly installed either in a mobile surgery unit or in a hospital operating room at lower cost. This feature makes it accessible to greater number of patients at lower treatment cost.

For the surgeons, this Stellaris(r) PC Vision Enhancement System allows better visibility of eye tissue while performing surgery because it is fitted with dual light source and color filters. This system comes with revolutionary Stable Chamber(TM) tubing system which facilitates the eye surgeon to make the smallest incisions for both retinal and cataract surgeries. This was not possible with traditionally available bio-medical devices.  This facilitates better clinical outcome with highest precision.  This system comes with vitrectomy probes which can operate on ultrahigh-speed and have very light weight. This significantly improves the success rate of transconjunctival vitrectomy procedures.

When we think of E. coli we generally consider one of two types of infections. On the one hand, there are the E. coli infections that pop up from time to time infected meat, usually beef. Some strains of E. coli can cause a particularly nasty bloody diarrhea that is fatal to the very young and the very old. On the other hand, E. coli is also the bug that is usually associated with an annoying, but generally not serious, urinary tract infection or UTI. Aside from these common diseases, E. coli can cause a number of human diseases ranging from mild to severe.

The saving grace has been that early antibiotic treatment E. coli infections have kept the bacterium from causing serious disease and make mild diseases go away very quickly. Unfortunately researchers have identified a drug-resistant strain of E. coli that thwarts the efforts of all of the typical antibiotics that would normally stop the bug in its tracks.

While this new drug resistant has only recently been reported, there have been isolated cases in the Americas, Europe, and Australia. Other continents are presumed to be or will soon be affected. Not only is it widespread, it is rapidly becoming the dominant strain in human disease. One report found that 40% of E. coli samples surveyed were of this resistant strain. Even more frightening is that these E. coli bacteria possess a new gene called NDM-1 that makes them resistant to basically every antibiotic that we have.

The response to this rapidly emerging health threat has been swift; however, the steps needed to fight this new superbug will take time and resources. In separate lines of research, the source of this new strain and this NDM-1 gene need to be isolated, the bug itself needs to be fully characterized, rapid testing methods for this drug resistant strain need to be developed, measures to stop the spread of the bug must be instituted, and a new antibiotic must be created to meet this threat.

Kumarasamy KK, Toleman MA, Walsh TR et al. Emergence of a new antibiotic resistance mechanism in India, Pakistan, and the UK: a molecular, biological, and epidemiological study. Lancet Infect Dis 2010.

Conventional radiation therapy treatment for lung cancers required 25 to 30 sessions of radio therapy where each session lasted for about 30 minutes.

The next generation Gated RapidArc technology introduced by Varian Medical Systems, Inc allows the doctor to detect the exact location of cancer in the lung with highest precision, while the patient is breathing. The Gated RapidArc technology uses 4-Dimensional Gated Stereotactic Body Radiosurgery to deliver full dose of radiation therapy in just 1 to 3 sessions of ten minutes each. This helps to reduce the effective treatment to just one week as compared to six weeks treatment time with conventional radiation therapy treatment.

The Gated RapidArc technology uses advanced motion management capability to ‘gate’ the radiation beam, turning it on or off in response to tumor motion during treatment. This helps to eliminate the cancerous lung tissue with high precision without causing any damage to surrounding healthy lung tissue.

The Gated RapidArc technology is superior to conventional radiation therapy and traditional invasive surgical treatments because it is completely non-invasive and leaves no scars from surgical incisions on body.

Source: Varian Medical Systems, Inc.

Chronic back pain is second most common cause of missed work in America affecting people of age between 30 years to 50 years, the first being headache.

Chronic back pain could result from a failed back surgery or from injury or trauma to the back. It could also result from degenerative conditions like arthritis, disc disease, diabetes or osteoporosis. Sometimes the cause of chronic back pain remains unidentified and the condition worsens progressively.

The Implantable Pulse Generator is a newly developed micro-electronic device powered by a battery which can be used to control & cure chronic back pain. This device can be implanted into the epidural space, next to the spinal cord in human body. Very small pulses of electricity are generated from this device to block or stimulate nerve signals. When the nerve causing the pain is blocked or stimulated (depending on the condition), pain stops and is replaced with a more mild sensation known as paresthesia.

Source: Morgan Technical Ceramics

Robotic surgery is not a terribly new concept. While it is still not completely standard equipment like a CT scanner, there is at least one example of a robotic surgical device in most large medical centers in the United States. These devices include two parts, one section has several robotic arms that are used as surrogates for the surgeon’s hands and contain various surgical instruments built within it. The other part is a console with a screen and a sophisticated version of a joystick at which a surgeon is seated and drives the robotic arms.

Atrial fibrillation is a condition in which abnormal electrical signals cause the small chambers of the heart (atria) to contract inappropriately and out of sync with the rest of the heart. Atrial fibrillation is usually caused by a cluster of nervous tissue near the border between the heart and the lungs. If you can snake a catheter to that site and ablate (destroy) the problematic tissue, you can cure atrial fibrillation. While interventional cardiologists have been doing this for years, they have only recently started doing it remotely.

The makers of the da Vinci Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgical System, one of the leading manufacturers of robotic surgery technology, have long discussed that there equipment is designed and intended to be used all within the same surgical room. The physician sits at a console that is physically next to the patient’s operating table. Obviously, though, the implications for telemedicine are profound. If the surgeon need not be physically present during a surgery, surgical techniques could be brought to remote locations without large surgical hospitals.

A cardiothoracic surgeon could sit at a console in his New York office and drive the robotic arms of a device in a clinic in Kenya. While intercontinental surgery is still a dream, by stepping into the next room Australian physicians have made a giant leap for the advancement of telemedicine.

Having specific ‘biomarkers’ attached to tumors, a special mixture of nano-particles and antibodies are injected into the blood stream. It finds and binds to the tumor and then the mixture just washes out of the body and has minimal side effects. “Once the nano-particles bind to the tumor, we excite them with an external magnetic field, and they begin to heat very specifically and locally” Gannot explains. After deploying the magnetic field, the temperature rises on the targeted area, and the heat elevation results in killing the tumors.

This new treatment has been effective on epithelial cancers, about 85% of cancers, which could be developed in any area of the body.

One other benefit of this method is the speed of the treatment. It is said to be administered in an outpatient setting and would not exceed more than six hours. This new research will be published in Nanomedicine journal.

The success rate of In Vitro Fertilization varies widely and depends a lot on the quality of preimplantation embryos produced by in vitro manipulation as compared to embryos produced in vivo.

Researchers at University of Michigan Medical Center have found that when preimplantation embryos are allowed to grow outside the human body in dynamic culture systems which simulate the in vivo biomechanical environment, it resulted in the development of better quality embryos.

These researchers have developed a new device called Dynamic Microfunnel Embryo Culture System which enhances the In Vitro Fertilization treatment outcomes by providing a better simulation of the fluid-mechanism and biochemical stimulation embryos experience in vivo from ciliary currents and oviductal contractions. This resulted in 22 percent higher success rate of In Vitro Fertilization treatment in mice. This study could pave the way to increase embryo production efficiency for higher successful In Vitro Fertilization treatment rates in humans.

Source:  Journal Human Reproduction, 2010

Traditional imaging devices like medical ultra-sonography, magnetic resonance imaging, and confocal microscopy are not suitable for  screening the infant eye to detect retinopathy of prematurity. This is because medical ultrasonography and magnetic resonance imaging generate tissue scan images with poor resolution. Confocal microscopy lacks millimeter penetration depth and provides scanned images for only superficial layers of eye tissue. Ophthalmoscope or camera also has limitations because it can only generate two dimensional images of superficial or anterior layers of eye tissue.

Duke University Medical Center has now introduced a new hand held biomedical engineering device called spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD OCT) to screen for retinopathy of prematurity in premature baby’s eye.  This SD OCT device uses narrow beam of broadband light sources which can penetrate the deeper layers of tissue to generate a three dimensional scanned image of posterior section of the infant eye. Using a hand held probe, this SD OCT device can click cross-sectional images of retina by laterally combining a series of these axial depth scans. This SD OCT device can snap images of retina 40 times faster than previous versions of OCT.

This reduces the time spent on diagnosis & increases the precision in detecting the occurrence & severity of retinopathy of prematurity in premature baby. This also significantly reduces the discomfort to hospital staff and parents, as the premature baby does not have to be moved out of the incubator to click these images by SD OCT device. The scan images generated by SD OCT device could significantly influence the decision-making by doctors during treatment.

Source: Duke University Eye Center