Innovation

GE and Mayo Clinic announce today that they are the recipients of a five-year, $5.7 million research grant to study and develop a dedicated MRI brain scanner to image a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders, including stroke, depression, and autism.

"A smaller, lighter, dedicated head-only MRI system will have a huge positive impact on the field of psychiatry," said Steve Williams, head of the Department of Neuroimaging at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, in a news release. "During the past decade, brain imaging research has dramatically improved our understanding of mental … Read more

Temple University physics department chair Rongjia Tao made headlines in 2008 when he developed a simple device that creates an electric field to thin fuel, thereby reducing the size of the droplets injected into the engine and improving fuel efficiency.

Now, Tao and former graduate student Ke Huang are unveiling their latest research that this same principle, when applied to the human body, can help thin blood and reduce one's risk of heart attack--without the side effects of blood thinners such as aspirin.

After testing numerous blood samples at Temple, the physicists were able to use a magnetic field of 1.3 Telsa (roughly equivalent to what is used in an MRI) for just one minute to polarize the red blood cells, which contain iron, thereby causing those cells to link together in short, streamlined chains flowing down the center of blood vessels and reducing friction along the walls.

The result: smoother blood flow. In fact, after just 1 to 12 minutes of exposure to the magnetic field via a 1,000-pound magnet, blood viscosity decreased by 20 to 30 percent for several hours. Eventually, blood viscosity returned to previous levels.… Read more

In a recent study of 37 healthy and symptomatic adults and children, a wireless near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) device performed as well in diagnosing bladder disease as current and often invasive techniques, such as cystoscopy.

"Currently, diagnosing bladder dysfunction usually requires an invasive test that involves urethral and rectal catheter insertion to measure bladder pressure and urine output--a stressful and painful procedure that provides a limited amount of physiologic information," said lead author Andrew Macnab, a pediatrics and urology professor at the University of British Columbia, in a news release.

"Our study shows that near-infrared spectroscopy--a non-toxic and … Read more

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pushing harder than ever for government leaders around the world to increase vaccination investments.

In a keynote address yesterday to the 64th World Health Assembly in Geneva, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates spoke for nearly half an hour to health ministers from 193 countries about the importance of "seeking good health care for every human being."

"I believe we have the opportunity to make a new future in which global health is the cornerstone of global prosperity," he said.

Gates called on the assembly to make this "the Decade of Vaccines," with some basic goals: eradicate polio early in this decade; build a system capable of delivering vaccines to every child; make five or six new vaccines available to all children around the world. With these investments, Gates said, the world "can save 4 million lives by 2015 and 10 million lives by 2020."

Another challenge Gates cited was lowering the cost of antigenic materials, such as pentavalent, pneumococcus, and rotavirus vaccines. The Gates Foundation is working with vaccine manufacturers to cut prices of those inoculations in half by 2016. Lower costs would be beneficial to many countries around the world that are reeling from budget woes. … Read more

May is National Stroke Awareness month, and Boca Raton, Fla.-based NovaVision is using the occasion to trumpet a successful new therapy for partial vision loss due to stroke.

According to NovaVision's statistics, stroke is a primary cause of serious long-term disability and often causes partial blindness due to neurological trauma and visual field loss. For example, a stroke victim might retain general sight, but lose their peripheral vision or even the ability to see if he or she moves eyes to the left or right. Until now, according to NovaVision research, the opinion amongst most physicians stated such … Read more

After being available for several years in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Europe, Swedish firm Sectra's digital mammography system has now been approved by the FDA for use in the U.S. (It was also approved for use in Canada in March and in Russia in April.)

The system, called MicroDose, uses technology called photon counting that results in two key changes over traditional mammograms: higher-resolution images at half the radiation exposure.

"Until now, digital mammography systems in the U.S. have managed to reduce the radiation dose slightly below those of film-based systems," Dr. Jesper … Read more

While microscopes might be affixed to cell phones, they don't usually look like them. But it seems the researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Germany got the designer bug when they developed this one.

In this case, though, form is actually following function. The microscope is flat because it has been entirely rethought, with several tiny lenses to simultaneously scan one image instead of one that scans and then groups together many images.

"Our ultrathin microscope consists of not just one but a multitude of tiny imaging channels, with lots of tiny lenses arrayed alongside one another" Dr. Frank Wipperman, who managed the team, said in a news release. "Each channel records a tiny segment of the object at the same size for a 1:1 image."… Read more

Plenty of teens can tell you about the therapeutic benefits of video games. Health care companies are increasingly looking at the value of games too.

That's because games offer incentives that health care providers can harness to alter patient habits. "Health behavior change is hard," Alex Tam, a senior interaction designer at frog design, said at the Innovation Learning Network conference for health care providers in Seattle hosted by the design consultancy. "It's frustrating. There's extra work."

Health care providers can use the tools of game design to innovate in prevention and treatment. That's important because patient behavior often gets in the way of their recovery. Physical therapy after surgery can be grueling, leading many patients to forgo, or delay it. Busy schedules can often get in the way of taking medication or checking important gauges of health such as blood-glucose levels.

Tam works with health care providers on building game mechanics into products. When faced with competition, timers and progression measurements, all the tools of game design, patients perform better. "Games get people engaged," Tam said. "They will play for hours and hours."

Take Expresso Fitness exercise bicycles. The indoor training cycles come with a video game that users navigate by pedaling. They get points by chasing and catching dragons, for example, or picking up coins. Cyclists spin faster and longer. "You're very focused on the game and not on your pedaling," Tam said.

Some games simply educate patients about treatments, which helps them follow proper protocols. HopeLab created Re-mission, a first-person shooter game, where a pilot named Roxxi travels through the bodies of cancer patients destroying cancer cells, battling bacterial infections, and managing treatments. It's not Call Of Duty, to be sure. But studies have shown that cancer patients who played the game at least one hour per week maintained higher levels of chemo in their blood and took their antibiotics more consistently.

"This isn't just blue sky thinking," said Teaque Lenahan, frog's director of business development. "There really are a lot of opportunities."

Updated at 9:15 p.m. to correct the spelling of Alex Tam's name. … Read more

DNA molecules are not merely carriers of information. They are also highly stable and programmable, which is why researchers have been working so feverishly on a design strategy called DNA origami.

And now a team at MIT is developing a program that makes the game playable by more than just a select few.

DNA origami--constructing specific 2D and 3D shapes out of DNA strands--could prove to be a highly effective means of developing nanoscale tools, such as synthetic photocells that perform artificial photosynthesis and highly targeted drugs (think of sending a cancer drug to hunt down a specific tumor).

But it's still young. Paul Rothemund of CalTech first introduced DNA origami in 2006 (thereby making the cover of Nature and delivering a TED Talk showing tiny DNA smiley faces), and William Shih's lab at Harvard Medical School was able to up the game from 2D to 3D a few years later.

The result is that today a small number of brilliant and highly specialized minds are bent over a nanoscale game of origami, playing with various sequences to try to build specific shapes for specific tasks. Imagine a room of highly sophisticated gamers playing with building blocks in a world without Tetris; if they had the game, they'd be able to work faster.… Read more