lungs

Within a couple years, a single exhale may tell us more about our personal health than merely the current state of our oral hygiene -- and without relying on dogs to sniff out our problems.

The answer lies in a device called the Single Breath Disease Diagnostics Breathalyzer. Back in 2010, Stony Brook University researcher Perena Gouma began testing an earlier iteration in preclinical trials; for use with diabetes patients; now she has developed a sensor that might enable the detection of a range of diseases in a single exhale.

The sensor, which lives in a device about half the … Read more

A nonprofit research database system called QResearch--which already screens for heart disease, kidney disease, and serious blood cots--is now introducing what look to be highly accurate lung and gastroesophageal cancer screenings as well.

The University of Nottingham and ClinRisk researchers behind the computer-based tool say that their findings, published this week in the British Journal of General Practice, indicate that 10 percent of the patients predicted to be most at risk of developing one of the cancers accounted for 77 percent of actual cancer diagnoses over the following two years.

Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners Dr. … Read more

Scientists at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have designed an artificial lung that uses air instead of pure oxygen as a ventilating gas--an advance that could turn accompanying oxygen cylinders into relics of the past.

What's more, the device for use in humans could come in at just 6x6x4 inches, which is roughly the volume of the real human lung, meaning it could conceivably pave the way for implantable artificial lungs.

"Current technology involves complex systems that are limited to intensive care units, so [the] device has the potential to provide clinically relevant oxygenation levels using ambient air, opening the door to portable systems," says Jeffrey Borenstein, an expert in microsystems technology and biomedical devices at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., in a news release.

Joseph Potkay, an electrical engineering and computer science professor and the lead author of the paper describing the lung, estimates that based on current performance the unit could be powered by the heart instead of a mechanical pump.… Read more

Marketing and design company SapientNitro unveiled an app today that allows smokers to see exactly what cigarettes are doing to their lungs.

The AR Lungs app uses augmented reality and a database of medically correct digital lungs to illustrate the effects of cigarettes. People point a Webcam or smartphone camera at their chest and see a superimposed image of the digital lungs.

Using sliders, a person can adjust how many cigarettes they smoke a day and for how long to get a visual representation of the damage and discoloration they've suffered. A nonsmoker, meanwhile, would see healthy, pink lungs.

The app was developed as an unconventional way of spreading the antismoking message. The company said it is using the potential of augmented reality to help raise disease awareness. The digital lungs paint a stark image of the consequences of smoking.

Computer users with a Webcam can check the app out for free here. … Read more

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

The National Cancer Institute isn't changing one of its key messages: don't smoke--it'll kill you.

But the mortality data from its ongoing National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) involving more than 53,000 current and former heavy smokers ages 55 to 74 is so striking that the institute announced initial findings today, ahead of a more comprehensive report.

What the trial shows is that there have been 20 percent fewer deaths from lung cancer among trial participants who receive an annual low-dose CT scan than those who receive an annual standard chest X-ray.

While CT scans are already considered valuable … Read more

Bioengineered organs, still largely the stuff of sci-fi, may have just moved a step closer to reality with reports that scientists have successfully implanted lab-made lung tissue into living rats.

The fully functional tissue can exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, the key role of the lungs.

The scientists--led by a team at Yale University--used a chemical treatment to remove all existing cells from adult rat lungs, keeping the structure of the airways and vascular system intact to later serve as a sort of "scaffold" for the growth of new lung cells.

They then cultured a combination of lung cells using a bioreactor designed to mimic the fetal lung environment and repopulated the "decellularized" rat lung with the engineered cells. When implanted into rats for short intervals of 45 to 120 minutes, the new tissue exchanged gas in a manner similar to that of natural lungs.

The scientists, who detail their work in a Thursday issue of the journal Science, acknowledge that it may be some time before scientists can generate fully functional lungs in vitro, but they nonetheless are touting their research as a promising development in the quest to regenerate lung tissue.

"This is an early step in the regeneration of entire lungs for larger animals and, eventually, for humans," said Laura Niklason, a Yale professor and vice chair of the Departments of Anesthesiology and Biomedical Engineering and lead author of the study, which was funded by Yale and the National Institutes of Health. (Decellularization has also been used in experiments to rebuild a human heart). … Read more

The detection and treatment of solid cancers such as lung, breast, ovarian, colon, and prostate cancers could be on the verge of a major makeover, thanks to a new blood test developed at the University of Nottingham and spinoff company Oncimmune.

Early in a tumor's development, cancer cells produce antigens that trigger the body's immune system to release auto-antibodies in an attempt to fight them off. The body produces an abundance of these auto-antibodies to win the battle--more than the tumor does antigens, making the auto-antibodies easier to detect.

The test measures a panel of auto-antibodies in a … Read more

Currently, radiologists measure the sizes of potentially cancerous lung nodules by measuring their largest widths using a two-dimensional computer screen. (The method widely used to do this is called RECIST.) Now, researchers are investigating volumetrics, by which they can measure nodules in 3D.

Thanks to work done by a team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in the simplest of cancer cases, volumetrics appears to reveal volume changes far more precisely than currently possible on 2D screens, which could cut diagnosis time from six months down to four weeks, the researchers estimate.

"We found … Read more