Imaging tech

It all started when anesthesiologist Vernon Huang wanted to figure out a better way to streamline his billing. How could he bridge the gap between what's written on paper and what must be entered into an electronic database?

Huang, who's clocked in time as a senior manager for health care markets at Apple, designed the application for a digital pen whose tiny camera embedded right next to the ink cartridge captures every stroke of the written word on film and whose images are uploaded wirelessly and automatically to a remote database.

He knew such an invention has a range of applications well beyond billing, and founded Shareable Ink (headquartered in Newton, Mass., with a branch in San Mateo, Calif.). Medgadget caught up with Huang at TedMed and posted a shaky but informative demonstration:

There is, of course, competition.… Read more

Rom Houben has been trapped in a series of worst nightmares, including trying for 23 years to alert those around him that he was not in a coma. A new report suggests he's not alone in his experience.

In 1983, Belgian engineering student and martial arts enthusiast Houben, then 20, was in a car accident that was thought to have left him in a vegetative state. Doctors relied on the widely-used Glasgow Coma Scale, assessing his eyes, verbal, and motor responses. What they failed to notice was that Houben was actually conscious--but completely paralyzed.

"I screamed, but there … Read more

If you're the kind of person who likes to take scissors to old gadgets, this one's for you. Start-up RidRx is now selling an adapter to connect old stethoscopes to an iPhone or iPod Touch, along with a phone dock/holder and an app that translates the audio your stethoscope captures into such delightful digital accoutrements as sound spectrograms.

And yes, the firm's easy-to-follow instructions include taking trauma shears to your old 'scope to fit it to the patent-pending iStetho Adapter. So the whole process, from tinkering with hardware to taking current heart-rate readings with the iStethoscope … Read more

Computer scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore are developing a system that could help autistic children identify the emotions of those around them by first locating the edges of faces, then finding crucial fiducial points to extract and process features, and finally classifying those features into corresponding emotions.

Their paper, "Towards a Portable Intelligent Facial Expression Recognizer," is available online through the journal Intelligent Decision Technologies (Volume 3:3).

"Emotion is a state of feeling involving thoughts, physiological changes, and an outward expression," write the paper's authors, Teik-Toe Teoh, Yok-Yen Nguwi and Siu-Yeung Cho … Read more

Neither the electroscalpel (a surgical cutting tool) nor mass spectrometry (a technique to identify a molecule's elemental composition by measuring the ratio between its mass and charge) is new. But using the two together may enable surgeons to detect cancerous cells during, instead of before and after, surgery.

"When a surgeon is performing cancer surgery, he doesn't have any direct information on where the tumor is," Zoltán Takáts, a professor at Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, tells Technology Review. Being able to detect, analyze, and remove cells during surgery might result in … Read more

If we're honest, most of us are either snorers or sleeping next to one.

On a recent camping trip, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking we had a bear grunting just outside our tent; heart racing, I turned on my head lamp to investigate. Turns out my husband, who rarely snores, sounds like a bear when he does. I tossed and turned for an hour until finally shaking him awake to shut him up.

For couples dealing with this kind of sleep disruption on a regular basis, it's probably not a stretch to say … Read more

Every year, some 16,000 babies in the U.S. experience loss of vision due to retinopathy of prematurity (RoP), with 400 to 600 becoming legally blind, according to the National Eye Institute. When babies are born prematurely, their retinal blood vessels don't always develop fully, and the abnormal vessels are more prone to leaking and contracting. If that causes the retina to detach, babies can lose some or all vision.

A new handheld device, developed in part by biomedical engineers at Duke University Medical Center, uses something called spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD OCT) to create a 3D image of the back of the eye.

Duke Eye Center ophthalmologist Cynthia Toth compares the process to inspecting fish from the side of an aquarium instead of through an ocean's murky surface; the 3D high-resolution map reveals the retina's layers in intricate detail "at almost the cellular level," she says.… Read more

Electronic retinal implants that can help certain visually impaired people see better are getting closer to reality with a new MIT prototype (PDF).

Engineered eyes a la Blade Runner remain a long way off. But by replacing the function of retinal cells, the implants could help provide a degree of basic vision to those afflicted with retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration, major causes of blindness.

Users would wear special glasses fitted with a small camera that relays image data to a titanium-encased chip mounted on the outside surface of the eyeball. The chip would then fire an electrode array under the retina to stimulate the optic nerve. The glasses would also wirelessly transmit power to coils surrounding the eyeball.

MIT has been working on retinal implants for 20 years as part of the Boston Retinal Implant Project. About 10 years ago, researchers tested the electrodes on six blind patients, who reported seeing cloud-like images when stimulated.

MIT scientists led by John Wyatt, an electrical engineering professor, want to test their new prototype on patients within three years.

The implants have been successfully placed in pigs for as long as 10 months without damage to the electronics, according to MIT.

About 20 teams worldwide are working to realize the dream of eye implants that could work as well as cochlear implants for the hearing-impaired. But the delicate structures of the eye, as well as engineering challenges, have made for slow progress.

"To create a bionic eye is equivalent to trying to create a television as compared with a radio," Nigel Lovell, a professor at the University of New South Wales collaborating with Australian groups to create a bionic eye, says in this video. "It's orders of magnitude more complex."

One issue researchers must tackle is where to place the electrodes. The Australian group would place them on top of the retina, while MIT's approach is to place them beneath the retina. MIT says that reduces the risk of retinal tearing and requires less invasive surgery.

What might early bionic vision look like? Very low-res.… Read more