Medgadget

Virtobot Performs Virtual Autopsies

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 06:43:14 -0800

Virtobot is the name of a forensic robot used at the University of Bern's Institute of Forensic Medicine to perform virtual autopsies. In the futuristic Virtopsy laboratory, the robot scans the contours and texture of the human body by projecting light bars on it and acquiring high definition images. These data are combined with the CT images acquired by the scanner in the same room. A three dimensional image of the body is then reconstructed that can be used during forensic examinations and be preserved as long as necessary. Additionally, the robot can also perform CT guided biopsies. The US forces have already installed a Virtopsy laboratory at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to assess the cause of death of soldiers sent back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Video of the Virtobot in action:

Press release: Digital future heralded for forensic medicine...

The Virtopsy Project on Youtube...

Pall Leukotrap Helps Keep Leukocytes, Prions Out of Donated Blood

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:38:09 -0800

Pall Corporation out of Port Washington, NY has released a new blood filtration system that can screen out leukocytes, as well as prions. The Leukotrap Affinity Plus System already obtained European approval and is meant to be used as a filter for donated blood, that might be contaminated by prions. Prions, of course, are responsible for spongiform encephalopathy, and are difficult to detect since carriers often are not aware of their condition until symptoms arrive.

From the product page:

The filter system captures and reduces target contaminants while allowing the desired components to pass through, even those of equal or larger size.
Efficacy - Averaging greater than 3 log prion reduction

Efficiency - Leucocyte reduction meeting current EU and UK guidelines

Assurancen - Maintains therapeutic benefit of red cells

Easy to Use - Self priming filter for ease of use

Fast - Rapid filtration

High Yield - With unique recovery system

Press release: Pall Corporation Launches Next Generation Blood Filter that Simultaneously Reduces Prions and Leukocytes ...

Product page: Leukotrap Affinity Plus ...

Lab-on-a-Chip Sorts Through Virus Specimens at Low Cost

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:40:21 -0800

Researchers at Brigham Young University are reporting the development of a microfluidic device that is able to sort individual virus particles based on size. In addition to potentially being used one day in the clinical setting as a diagnosis modality, this technology should provide researchers with high speed sorting of pathogens for laboratory work.

The chips work like coin sorters, only they are much, much smaller. Liquids flow until they hit a wall where big particles get stuck and small particles pass through a super-thin slot at the bottom. Each chip’s slot is set a little smaller than the size of the particle to be detected. After the particles get trapped against the wall, they form a line visible with a special camera.

Capturing single particles has important applications besides simply knowing if a particular virus or protein is present.

“One of the things I hope to see is for these chips to become a tool for virus purification,” said David Belnap, an assistant professor of chemistry and co-author on the paper.

He explained that a tool like the BYU chip would advance the pace of his research, allowing him and other researchers to consistently obtain pure samples essential for close inspection of viruses.

A huge barrier to making chips that can detect viruses is $100 million – that’s the cost of machinery precise enough to make chips with nano-sized parts necessary for medical and biological applications.

The BYU group developed an innovative solution. First they used a simpler machine to form two dimensions in micrometers — 1,000 times larger than a nanometer. They formed the third dimension by placing a 50 nanometer-thin layer of metal onto the chip, then topping that with glass deposited by gasses. Finally they used an acid to wash away the thin metal, leaving the narrow gap in the glass as a virus trap.

So far, the chips have one slot size. Hawkins [Aaron Hawkins, professor of electrical and computer engineering at BYU] says his team will make chips soon with progressively smaller slots, allowing a single channel to screen for particles of multiple sizes. Someone “reading” such a chip would easily be able to determine which proteins or viruses are present based on which walls have particles stacked against them.

After perfecting the chips’ capabilities, the next step, Hawkins says, is to engineer an easy-to-use way for a lab technician to introduce the test sample into the chip.

Brigham Young press release: 'Lab on a chip' that detects viruses developed by BYU researchers...

Abstract in Lab on a Chip: Selective trapping and concentration of nanoparticles and viruses in dual-height nanofluidic channels

Evidence MultiStat from Randox Might Save Cardiac Lives and More

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:01 -0800

RANDOX Laboratories, a diagnostics company from Crumlin, UK, is releasing in Düsseldorf at Medica 2009 a new semi-automated analyzer that can perform detection of up to 12 analytes from a single patient sample in under 20 minutes. The Evidence MultiStat™ can save lives of cardiac patients or identify drug junkies, hence it can be used in emergency rooms, cardiology departments, ambulatory centers, or even employee drug screening centers.

The following arrays are currently available:

Cardiac Array [serum]: Creatine Kinase-MB (CK-MB), Fatty Acid Binding Protein (FABP), Myoglobin, Cardiac Troponin I (cTnI)
Drugs of Abuse Array I [urine]: Amphetamine, Barbiturates, Benzodiazepine 1, Benzodiazepine 2, Cannabinoids, Cocaine metabolite (Benzoylecgonine), Methamphetamine, Methadone, Opiates, Phencyclidine, Creatinine (dilution marker)

Product page: Evidence MultiStat...

Announcement on Twitter: Randox unveils cardiac care technology...

Ultrafast Lab-on-a-Chip for Detection of Disease Biomarkers

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:31:12 -0800

Researchers from IBM Research in Zurich and the University Hospital of Basel in Switzerland developed a microfluidic device that uses capillary action to detect the presence of protein biomarkers for various disease types. The five square centimeter silicon-based lab-on-a-chip takes only fifteen seconds to perform its analysis.

Here are the five functional stages of the device:

Stage 1: A one microliter sample, 50 times smaller than a tear drop, is pipetted onto the chip, where the capillary forces begin to take effect.

Stage 2: These forces push the sample through an intricate series of mesh structures, which prevent clogging and air bubbles from forming.

Stage 3: The sample then passes into a region where microscopically small amounts of the detection antibody have been deposited. These antibodies have a fluorescent tag and similar to the antibodies within our body, they recognize the disease marker and attach to it within the sample. Only seventy picoliters (a volume one million times smaller than a tear) of these antibodies are used, making their dissolution in the passing sample extremely fast and efficient.

Stage 4: The most critical stage is called the "reaction chamber" and it measures 30 micrometers in width and 20 micrometers in depth, roughly the diameter of a strand of human hair. Similar to a common pregnancy test, in this stage the disease marker that was previously tagged is captured on the surface of the chamber. By shining a focused beam of red light, the tagged disease markers can be viewed using a portable sensor device that contains a chip similar to those used by digital cameras, albeit this one being much more sensitive. Based on the amount of light detected, medical professionals can visually confirm the strength of the disease marker in the sample to determine the next course of treatment.

Stage 5: Less a stage and more a part of the entire process is the capillary pump. The capillary pump, which has a depth of 180 micrometers, contains an intricate set of microstructures, the job of which is to pump the sample through the device for as long as needed and at a regular flow rate, just like the human heart. This pump makes the test accurate, portable and simple to use. IBM scientists have developed a library of capillary pumps so that tests needing a variety of sample

More from IBM Research: IBM Scientists Reinvent Medical Diagnostic Testing ...

Abstract in Lab on a Chip: Toward one-step point-of-care immunodiagnostics using capillary-driven microfluidics and PDMS substrates

Camera Phone Microscope Uses Holographic Processing to View Cells

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:33:23 -0800

Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor at University of California, Los Angeles, has developed an attachment for camera phones that turns these devices into microscopes useful for histological and microbiological analysis. Interestingly, the device uses no additional optics but relies on processing the interference patterns of light coming from the samples to recreate the image.

A snippet from the New York Times:

For this electronic system of magnification, inexpensive light-emitting diodes added to the basic cellphone shine their light on a sample slide placed over the phone’s camera chip. Some of the light waves hit the cells suspended in the sample, scattering off the cells and interfering with the other light waves.
“When the waves interfere,” Dr. Brady said, “they create a pattern called a hologram.” The detector in the camera records that hologram or interference pattern as a series of pixels.

The holograms are rich in information, Dr. Ozcan said. “We can learn a lot in seconds,” he said. “We can process the information mathematically and reconstruct images like those you would see with a microscope.”

Virtual Autopsy Table Makes a Dirty Business Clean

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:21:17 -0800

Sweden's Norrköping Visualization Center, in collaboration with the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization, has developed a virtual autopsy system to substitute some of the manual work for touch manipulation on a flatscreen. A body under investigation is first scanned through a CT or MRI and the results of that can be manipulated using software that can filter images based on tissue density, luminance, and other criteria.

Here's a couple videos demonstrating the Virtual Autopsy Table:

Link: Virtual Autopsy Table...

(hat tip: Gizmag)

Mass Spectrometer Smells Out Tumor Cells During Surgery

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:01:07 -0800

Surgically removing tumors usually involves a bit of guessing on where cancerous tissue ends and healthy begins. The surgeons also have to keep the tumor margin as wide as possible to make sure that the entire specimen has been removed. Current methods to help make the guessing game more precise involves preoperative scans and sending surgical tissue samples for path analysis. Researchers from Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany have now recognized that when surgeons are using electric cautery, the smoke that's released contains information about what is being cut. By using a mass spectrometer attached to the smoke collecting vacuum, the scientists are hoping to develop a technology that will provide almost real time, clinically useful information about the tissue under the knife.

Technology Review reports:

The new system not only provides real-time information, but also produces an image of the tumor, using chemical information, which could also help guide postoperative care. The imager could, for example, reveal a particularly aggressive form of cancer, and this information could guide oncologists in prescribing the right drug.
So far, the German researchers have tested the surgical mass-spectrometry system in several animals, including rodents, with cancer. The group is also working with veterinarians to use the scalpel during tumor-removal surgeries in dogs with naturally occurring tumors. Next month the device will go into human clinical trials, and Takáts is working with Meyer-Haake, a German electrosurgical device company, to develop the machinery.

Hologic's Cervical Cancer Screening System ThinPrep Gets EU OK

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:28:34 -0800

Hologic out of Bedford, Massachusetts has announced that the firm's ThinPrep® Integrated Imager has received the European CE Mark, and that will allow the sale of the device across the continent. The ThinPrep provides cytology screening for cervical cancer by combining imaging and slide review into a single apparatus. Conveniently, the imager in the device can be used as a stand alone microscope for other purposes.

The integrated imager analyzes a ThinPrep Pap test slide in approximately 90 seconds, during which time each cell and cell cluster is scanned. Using optical density analysis, the integrated imager identifies diagnostically-relevant cells or cell groups and then stores coordinates of the 22 fields of interest. These 22 fields of interest are presented to the cytotechnologist for interpretation. If no abnormalities are identified by the cytotechnologist, the slide can be signed out as negative or proceed through the laboratory quality control system. A complete slide review is required if the user detects any suspicious cells within the 22 fields of view. This dual review process combines human interpretative expertise with the power of computer imaging.

Press release: Hologic Receives CE Marking for the ThinPrep® Integrated Imager...

Product page: ThinPrep...

Point of Care WBC Testing Device in The Works

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:38:46 -0800

A new microfluidic device from the University of Southampton, called single-cell impedance cytometer, is being reported in Lab on a Chip. The technology promises to perform a white blood cell differential count in a tiny package from a puny sample.

According to Dr David Holmes of ECS, lead author of the paper, the microfluidic set-up uses miniaturised electrodes inside a small channel. The electrical properties of each blood cell are measured as the blood flows through the device. From these measurements it is possible to distinguish and count the different types of cell, providing information used in the diagnosis of numerous diseases.
The system, which can identify the three main types of white blood cells - T lymphocytes, monocytes and neutrophils, is faster and cheaper than current methods.

‘At the moment if an individual goes to the doctor complaining of feeling unwell, a blood test will be taken which will need to be sent away to the lab while the patient awaits the results,' said Professor Morgan. 'Our new prototype device may allow point-of-care cell analysis which aids the GP in diagnosing acute diseases while the patient is with the GP, so a treatment strategy may be devised immediately. Our method provides more control and accuracy than what is currently on the market for GP testing.

The next step for the team is to integrate the red blood cell and platelet counting into the device. Their ultimate aim is to set up a company to produce a handheld device which would be available for about £1,000 and which could use disposable chips costing just a few pence each.

Full story: Device being developed for on-the-spot blood analysis...

Abstract in Lab on a Chip: Leukocyte analysis and differentiation using high speed microfluidic single cell impedance cytometry