January 1st, 2012 by Medgadget in News
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The airline industry has long been a paradigm example of safety, but it was not always that way. The transition occurred over the second half of the 20th century and was marked by rigorous equipment testing and procedures, such as the strict incorporation of checklists. Healthcare is an industry that recently has become quite interested in the possibility of implementing airline industry standards to improve patient safety and care delivery (read the books The Checklist Manifesto and Why Hospitals Should Fly if you’d like a solid overview of this phenomenon)
This month Lockheed Martin and Johns Hopkins, two institutional leaders in the fields of aviation and healthcare, respectively, announced a partnership to bring cutting-edge systems integration to the intensive care unit (ICU). According to the press release: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
December 26th, 2011 by Medgadget in News
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Abiomed‘s Impella left ventricular assist device, an endovascular percutaneously-delivered LVAD, will soon be getting a more powerful new model. The current model is capable of delivering an augmentation of cardiac output by up to 2.5 liters a minute, but the new Impella cVAD should do around 3.5 L/m, and possibly up to 4 L/m in the not too distant future.
The new device, and above numbers, were announced at Abiomed’s investor day conference and the company hopes to have the device available to clinicians by the Summer of 2012.
Here are the bullet points about Impella cVAD that were provided to us by Abiomed: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
December 19th, 2011 by Medgadget in Announcements, Research
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Over the past year our genetic understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes and cancer has been accelerated by thousands of video gamers thanks to an online flash game called Phylo. Phylo is a video game created by Dr. Jérôme Waldispuhl of the McGill Centre for BioInformatics and collaborator Mathieu Blanchette. The game itself is a framework for solving the common problem of multiple sequence alignments in comparative genomics and leverages the visual problem solving skills of online gamers.
The Phylo website explains the background to game: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
December 6th, 2011 by Medgadget in Research
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Obesity is the most significant chronic healthcare crisis facing the United States, as well as other countries. Already 1 out of every 3 adults, and 1 out of every 6 children or adolescents, in the U.S. is obese! Leptin is a hormone that has received considerable attention since its discovery in 1994 for its role in regulating metabolism (like a thermostat, or adipostat) and implications for obesity. High leptin levels are associated with feeling satiated and an active metabolism. Though many overweight people have high levels of circulating leptin, it’s been found that their hypothalamic neurons do not receive the signal – a phenomenon known as “leptin resistance.” An animal model that mirrors this is db/db mice, which lack leptin receptors on the surface of they hypothalamic neurons and are therefore morbidly obese (see image).
Reporting in Science this past week, researchers at Harvard Medical School transplanted neurons with the leptin receptor into the hypothalami of db/db mice and as a result were able to partially restore leptin sensitivity and ameliorate their obesity. Two to three months after transplanting 15,000 (a relatively small number) fluorescently-tagged, leptin sensitive neurons into the db/db mice hypothalami, they observed statistically significant drops in blood sugar levels, leptin concentration, and fat mass. In terms of the mechanism and implications, the team concludes: Read more »
December 4th, 2011 by Medgadget in Expert Interviews, Research
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Two months ago we reported on the first ovarian cancer surgeries performed with fluorescence guidance. As described in the Nature Medicine paper, the international team of researchers from The Netherlands, Germany, and Indiana used folate coupled to fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) to make ovarian cancer cells glow so they could be easily identified.
Now, in this week’s issue of Science Translational Medicine, another international team from Japan and Maryland reports their development of a spray-on probe that may provide even better sensitivity and fluorescent contrast than the folate-FITC counterpart. The editors of STM summarize this work well in the following note: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
