Imaging tech

Researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine have been studying the effects of media violence for more than a decade. Now, for the first time, they are showing that violent video games directly alter brain activity--not after years of play, but after one week.

It must be noted that the researchers, who presented their findings at this week's Radiological Society of North America annual meeting in Chicago, studied only 28 young men, ages 18 to 29. In other words, these findings are preliminary at best.

Still, the small study shows a direct relationship between playing violent video games … Read more

Traditionally, doctors and midwives have used a technique called pelvimetry to measure the pelvis and try to determine its adequacy for giving birth. But pelvis size is just one factor in how smoothly labor will go, rendering the method largely insufficient.

Scientists in France have been working to take some of the guesswork out of labor predictions. Today, at the Radiological Society of North America's annual meeting, they are presenting results of a study showing that their newly developed software, called Predibirth, predicts birth outcomes quite accurately.

The researchers used their software to process magnetic resonance images of 24 … Read more

Last year, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab unveiled a novel pulse-measuring technique that used a low-resolution Webcam. It worked by imaging the human face to detect the slightest changes in brightness resulting from blood flow.

Electronics maker Philips is now is bringing a strikingly similar technology to market with its Vital Signs Camera App, though with the rather important disclaimer that said app should not be considered a medical tool.

The app, released last week for 99 cents, uses the iPad's built-in camera to detect those tiny changes in color--which Philips calls "micro-blushes"… Read more

Magnetic resonance imaging scanners produce images of the body using strong magnetic fields and radio waves to scan several images of the same area. By comparing these images, the scanner reveals even the most subtle abnormalities, such as young tumors.

Considering the nature of MRI scanners, it stands to reason that math might improve the time it takes to get and compare these images.

Electrical engineers and computer scientists at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics thought so, and they are publishing an algorithm they have devised that speeds scanning time threefold, reducing the amount of time someone would have … Read more

Eight months and several hurdles after receiving 510(k) clearance, mobile-health company Mobisante says its smartphone ultrasound device is officially on the market.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance alone took so long that the MobiUS system--intended to be used in fetal, abdominal, cardiac, pelvic, and peripheral vessel imaging--only works with the 2-year-old Windows Mobile 6.5-based Toshiba TG01 smartphone and requires a USB 2.0 port for the probe. In other words, it won't be compatible with iPhones and Android-based phones, which don't support USB 2.0.… Read more

What do you get when you combine an Android smartphone, cell phone image sensor, Lego building blocks, and a handful of Caltech engineers and biologists? The ePetri, which isn't Petri Dish 2.0, but a full reworking of a technology that dates back to the late 1800s.

Traditionally, the Petri dish (named after German bacteriologist Julius Richard Petri) has been used in the medical field to identify bacterial infections by studying samples via microscope as the cultured cells grow in an incubator.

The Caltech researchers have a few choice words for such an approach in 2011, including "expensive," "labor-intensive," and "suboptimal." So they set out to improve not just the dish, but the entire process.… Read more

It's no secret that as we age, our vision deteriorates. Over time, our eyes tend to lose their ability to focus on nearby objects. I know what that's like. I'm farsighted.

I've always been told my poor eyesight is unavoidable and unfixable. So I felt hopeful at hearing that an iPhone app called GlassesOff promises to "help you achieve over 80 percent improvement in vision acuity" by training your brain to more efficiently process the blurred images that result from near-vision deterioration.… Read more

A team of physicists and engineers out of the University of California at Davis are taking the iPhone 4 to new heights--and they're not talking about No. 5.

Using materials that cost about as much as a typical app, they tricked out an iPhone with a few new tools, including a microscope, which--with the phone's camera--could identify features as small as 1.5 microns. That's small enough to identify different blood cell types.

"Field workers could put a blood sample on a slide, take a picture, and send it to specialists to analyze," says Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu, a physicist at the Center for Biophotonics, Science and Technology and lead author of the research to be presented in mid-October at the Optical Society's Annual Meeting in San Jose, Calif.

In rural clinics in developing nations, which tend to have limited if any lab equipment, these decked-out iPhones could help nurses and doctors diagnose a range of blood diseases by not only imaging blood cells but sending data in real time to colleagues anywhere around the world for further analysis.… Read more

Optical tweezers have been used by biophysicists since their invention at Bell Labs in the 1980s, and are typically used to study cellular components. But they have a few drawbacks, not least of which are overheating and inefficiency.

So engineers at Harvard have been working on a next-gen model they call plasmonic nanotweezers to solve those and other issues with traditional optical tweezers so that tiny particles such as viruses can be isolated, observed, and manipulated.

Back at Bell Labs, scientists had shined a laser through a microscope lens to focus it tightly. They found that light, made of electromagnetic waves, creates a gradient force at the point of focus that is capable of attracting a tiny particle and holding it in that beam of light until random motion or some other force knocks it out.

The basic limitation of this approach is that a lens cannot focus that beam beyond half the wavelength of light, so if the particle the researchers hope to trap is smaller than the focal spot, they might have trouble trapping it.

Meanwhile, that focal size limit also places an upper limit on the gradient force generated, and yet a stronger force is required to trap nanoscale particles. So for a conventional optical tweezer to capture nanoscale particles, a high-powered laser is required.… Read more