Imaging tech

Withings baby monitor smart enough for your phone

LAS VEGAS--New parents who skipped CES this year to stay at home with the little one, your timing was just a few months off.

Withings unveiled its Smart Baby Monitor at the show today, and says it expects the devices to start shipping in late March. (Pricing details are to be determined.)

The monitor, which looks like a cute, little-kid version of a spy gadget, is unlike traditional baby monitors in that it does not involve close-distance communication between devices. Rather, the high-resolution 3-megapixel camera with extra-wide lens (not to mention night vision with infrared LEDs and temperature and humidity … Read more

Audi partnership adds surgeons to team of accident researchers

For an unlucky few, a severe accident will indeed be a learning experience. And the Audi Accident Research Unit puts these lessons to good use.

Audi's team of researchers recreates and deconstructs accident events, taking more than 400 photographs of the vehicle and logging approximately 1,300 technical details in its database to improve safety systems. The carmaker has formed a partnership with the AO Foundation, and Audi's accident database will now be available to the organization's global association of orthopedic surgeons.

The partnership will be a new link in the accident research chain. A case isn'… Read more

New tech holds tissue still for cellular imaging

Motion can present major challenges in photography in general, not to mention with medical imaging techniques such as MRIs. But a new method using simple suction appears to stabilize living lung tissue without disrupting normal organ function long enough to image the live interactions of living cells, including immune response to injury.

With more than 20 articles about microscopy under their belts, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco publish their latest findings in this month's issue of Nature.

"The nature of disease is complex, so if scientists can observe in real-time what's happening in … Read more

Ultrasound could help diagnose prostate cancer

In 2010 alone, some 217,730 men in the U.S. have been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and some 32,050 have died from it, according to the American Cancer Society. But diagnosis relies largely on painful, nontargeted biopsies that result in many false negative results.

So researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands have been developing a technique that uses ultrasound to more effectively target tumors, and they say they've had great success in the four patients on whom they've tested it.

The technique involves injecting microbubbles of a contrast agent into the patient. Using … Read more

'Open' MRI scanner captures live birth in Germany

Props to the woman in Germany who this morning became the first ever to give birth inside a magnetic-resonance imaging scanner.

Yes, the prototype scanner was built specifically for labor, and MRIs have been deemed quite safe. But the woman still had to give birth inside one, not to mention wear earmuffs to block out the high-frequency noise. (To protect the newborn's hearing, the scanner was switched off as soon as the amniotic sac surrounding it opened.)

Woman and baby are both fine, according to gynecologist Ernst Beinder at Berlin's Charité Hospital, who tells the Daily Mail … Read more

Surgeons using iPads in operating rooms

Georgetown University has begun a program that uses iPads in their operating rooms to assist doctors with complicated operating procedures.

The iPads allow surgeons easy access to all sorts of medical data, imagine, and processes during an operation. The ease of using iOS comes in handy (no pun intended), since no stylus or keyboards are needed. It's quick and efficient, according to a Journal of Surgical Radiology statement:

With its attractive screen and networking capabilities, the iPad offers surgeons real-time access to images and patient data during an operation. Integrating it into routine clinical practice can save lives and … Read more

Noninvasive 'virtual biopsy' diagnoses brain injury

For many, getting hit in the head too many times might bring to mind famed boxer Muhammad Ali, but brain injuries across several sports, including hockey and American football, have prompted investigations into headgear and even the nature of the sports themselves.

For now, the only way to diagnose what is called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is to inspect brain tissue during autopsies--in other words, after the point at which such a diagnosis could help the afflicted.

So while results from a study out of Boston of a noninvasive "virtual biopsy" technique on live subjects are both small-scale … Read more

Face shield could head off trauma in military

Soldiers may soon be able to avoid an all too common injury associated with modern warfare, if a new helmet and visor design make it to the field.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the most common military injury is known as "blast-induced traumatic brain injury." Some 130,000 U.S. service members deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have sustained traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) as a result of explosions, according to the Department of Defense, which can result in concussions, long-term brain damage, and death. (And that number could be even higher.)

So a team of researchers at MIT have … Read more

Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth

The human brain is truly awesome.

A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

These synapses are, of course, so tiny (less than a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter) that humans haven't been able to see with great clarity what exactly they do and how, beyond knowing that their numbers vary over time. That is until now.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have spent the past few years engineering a new imaging model, which they call array tomography, in conjunction with novel computational software, to stitch together image slices into a three-dimensional image that can be rotated, penetrated and navigated. Their work appears in the journal Neuron this week.

To test their model, the team took tissue samples from a mouse whose brain had been bioengineered to make larger neurons in the cerebral cortex express a fluorescent protein (found in jellyfish), making them glow yellow-green. Because of this glow, the researchers were able to see synapses against the background of neurons.… Read more