Click and Pump Insulin Delivery Device from Calibra Medical

Filed under: Medicine , Pediatrics

Calibra Medical out of Redwood City, CA has received FDA approval to market its Finesse insulin patch-pen. Earlier this year, Bernard Farrell over at his Diabetes Technology Blog had a chance to get a closer look at the fully mechanical device.

A snippet:

The design itself is slim enough that it should be invisible under most clothing. It contains a reservoir that holds 200 units of insulin.
To dispense insulin you simply squeeze the two small buttons on both sides of the Finesse, the unit clicks with each press so you can count the number of units delivered. There's an interlocking mechanism, so both buttons must be pressed before any insulin is bolused, this is designed to avoid accidental dispensing of insulin. It's a bolus-only device, so users will still need shots of long-acting insulin.

Read on at Diabetes Technology Blog...

Press release: Calibra Gains FDA Clearance to Market Finesse™ Insulin Patch-Pen for Three-Day Use With Novolog®...

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DizzyFIX Takes Care of Vertigo at Home

Filed under: ENT , Rehab

Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) is an unpleasant condition that usually requires frequent visits with a therapist or a crazy ride on a specialty body spinning system. A cheaper at-home solution is the DizzyFIX device from Clearwater Clinical, which has been shown to achieve very positive results in a new University of Western Ontario study. The DizzyFIX is kind of a magnified simulator of what's going on in the inner ear. You attach it to the tip of a baseball hat, load in a small marble, and guide the marble through the tubes by tilting your head.

From the study abstract:

Results Patients using the home treatment device had no evidence of nystagmus in posttreatment Dix-Hallpike maneuvers at 1 week in 88% of cases (n = 40). This rate was comparable to standard treatment. There were no significant complications.

Conclusion The use of this device enables patients with an established diagnosis of posterior canal BPPV to safely conduct an effective particle repositioning maneuver and achieve success rates similar to those found with the standard Epley maneuver.

Abstract in Archives in Otolaryngology, Head & Neck Surgery: Efficacy of a New Home Treatment Device for Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo

Product page: DizzyFIX

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BrainLAB's ExacTrac Monitors Patient Motion During Radiotherapy

Filed under: Radiation Oncology

BrainLAB has announced the availability of its ExacTrac Infrared Monitoring device, which can be added to radiotherapy setups to track patients' position during treatment. The system can then be used to compensate for patient motion, including periodic movement due to breathing. This motion correction technology will allow doctors to minimize damage to healthy tissue by administering a more precisely targeted dose of radiation.

From the press release:

Cone Beam CT (CBCT) is a common tool used by many cancer care centers for patient setup; however, it does not track patient position changes that can occur during treatment. The ExacTrac Infrared Monitoring ceiling-mounted device tracks the patient position throughout treatment delivery, giving clinicians more confidence for targeted radiation treatment.
A small shift from the initial patient setup can result in damage to normal tissue surrounding the tumor. The Brainlab technology uses infrared tracking to continually monitor the patient's position and check the reference position. ExacTrac Infrared Monitoring can be used during treatment of a wide range of indications, including cranial, head & neck, prostate, lung, liver and spine.

Press release: Brainlab Offers Real-Time Monitoring for IGRT...

Product page: IGRT for Tumor Motion Management...

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Around 70,000 Children a Year Injured by Medical Devices

Filed under: in the news...

FDA researchers have published a study in Pediatrics that analyzed patient records from child and teen ER visits in 2004 and 2005. The investigators are reporting that 70,000 kids each year go to the ER because of issues caused by medical devices. About a quarter of those injuries were from contact lenses, while the other major contributors were needles, wheelchairs, braces, and obstetric exam tools. The study also looked at the devices most likely to cause hospitalization, and they were found to be mostly invasive devices like ostomy appliances and implanted defibrillators.

From the study abstract:

Results The total estimated number of pediatric medical device associated adverse events (MDAEs) during the 24-month period was 144799 (95% confidence interval: 113051–183903), involving devices from 13 medical specialties. Contact lenses accounted for most MDAEs (23%), followed by hypodermic needles (8%). The distribution of MDAEs according to medical specialty varied according to age subgroup. The most-prevalent types of injuries included contusions/abrasions, foreign-body intrusions, punctures, lacerations, and infections. The most-frequently affected body parts were the eyeball, pubic region, finger, face, and ear. The majority of pediatric MDAEs involved class II (moderate-risk) devices. The incidence of pediatric MDAEs decreased with increasing age from early to late childhood and then spiked after 10 years of age. More girls than boys were affected at older ages (16–21 years) and more boys than girls at younger ages (≤10 years). Hospitalizations were more likely to involve invasive or implanted devices.

Article in Pediatrics: Emergency Department Visits for Medical Device-Associated Adverse Events Among Children

Image credit...

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Friday, July 23, 2010

How Chance Can Affect Perceived Effectiveness of Clinical Treatment Outcomes

Filed under: in the news...

BBC News Magazine has an interesting interactive article that attempts to demonstrate how chance can make or break a reputation of a hospital or a surgeon in respect to their morbidity and mortality outcomes. In a special calculator, simply by selecting the percentage chance of someone dying, and clicking repeatedly, you can get a recalculated variance in outcome results between hospitals. We get the point, but it's not clear what the practical or political use this story is serving.

BBC News Mag: Can chance make you a killer?

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Wolfram|Alpha Adds Drug Treatment Info

Filed under: Net News

Wolfram|Alpha, the popular data search engine, has recently upgraded its medical capabilities even further with a drug guide that can help patients find out pharmaceutical options for various conditions. Simply by searching for something like "diabetes drug treatment", you will get the categories of drugs prescribed, and related pharma data.

More at Wolfram|Alpha blog: Ask Wolfram|Alpha about Medical Drug Treatments...

Link: Wolfram|Alpha

Flashbacks: WolframAlpha Imports WHO Numbers; Wolfram|Alpha Beefs Up Its Medical Capabilities; Wolfram Alpha and Its Medical Powers

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QuizMD May Help Get You Through Medical School

Filed under:

Berci Meskó over at ScienceRoll points out QuizMD, a service developed by med students for med students to prepare for exams. There are question answer sections, case reviews, links to further information online and a lot more. Berci uses it to stay fresh on his medical knowledge since graduating with an MD himself, and that's a pretty good endorsement as far as we're concerned.

It was created to help students help each other succeed, to collectively scratch each others' backs. Education doesn't need to be difficult. Take control and make it yours.
It is an entirely student developed and supported venture, independent of association with any university or post-secondary institution. Thank you for your continued contributions and support.

Link: QuizMD

ScienceRoll: Medical school e-learning

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Twitter Used to Psychoanalyze Entire Nation

Filed under: Net News , Public Health

A team from Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School has been analyzing words used in tweets by American users in an attempt to gauge the public mood around the country. What they discovered was that users on the West Coast seem to be quite a bit jollier than those on the East Coast. It is not clear whether the data was collected during the summer or winter months and accordingly adjusted, for that surely would affect the readings.

Researchers were able to infer the mood of each tweet using a psychological word-rating system developed by the National Institute of Mental Health’s Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention. The system ranks words based on how they make people feel.
Tweets containing words such as “love,” or triumph,” for example, received high mood scores, whereas messages with words such as “hell,” or “death” earned low marks.

Researchers then calculated an hour-by-hour average mood score for users in each state, and geographically represented the data using a density-equalizing map in which each region is scaled to represent its number of tweets as opposed to its land area.

Here's a day's worth of tweets and how our mood changes throughout the day:

Press release: What's in a tweet?

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The Latest on HealCam

Filed under: Medgadget Exclusive

HealCam, our free no registration video chat service for people with medical conditions, continues to generate excitement among bloggers, journalists, twitterers, and other people. The site has now been profiled on a Dutch medical magazine Zorgvisie, a popular Croatian blog tehnoklik, as well as on Shiny Shiny. We also thank individual bloggers like Zara Rabinowicz for spreading the word around. The site is also creating a constant buzz on Twitter.

In other news, we signed up for a service at GetSatisfaction, to help us manage software bugs. So if you notice a bug, there is a link on the bottom of HealCam to report it.

So please help us spread the word around! Think of yourself, your elderly relatives and others, and tell them to visit HealCam.com. Thanks!

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Kevin Stone: The Bio-Future of Joint Replacement

Filed under: in the news...

Kevin Stone is an orthopedic surgeon who's been working on developing non-artificial, biological tissue replacement material for joint conditions. Here's his talk from TED 2010: