trauma

Brain scan may spot disease in athletes while they're still alive

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease thought to play a role in the deaths (which are sometimes suicides) of athletes, soldiers, and others who have suffered concussions and repeated hits to the head, is currently only able to be diagnosed postmortem.

"After a while it gets old and not so fulfilling to take the brain out when [an athlete] is dead," Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon and director of the Brain Injury Research Institute, told CNN. "At that point there is no solution, no answer."

So a study co-authored by Bailes suggesting that PET scans … Read more

Hair clip inspires device that clamps down traumatic bleeding

After three tours in Afghanistan as a trauma surgeon for the Canadian Navy, Dr. Dennis Filips was inspired -- by a simple hair clip -- to design a medical clamp that can stop traumatic wound bleeding in a matter of seconds.

Now the device, due to hit the market in multiple countries later this year, has earned Filips the top innovator award at last week's Life Science and Health Care Ventures Summit in New York.

The ITClamp will "level the playing field for everybody," Filips recently told the Edmonton Journal. (His firm, Innovative Trauma Care, is based … Read more

New Army helmet to measure head impact

Three words you don't want to hear around the Simbex's new shock measuring helmet. "Wait! Wear this."

The U.S. Army has awarded $932,000 to Lebanon, N.H.-based Simbex for 20 Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) System-equipped helmets to be used to "measure the shock from explosive devices." The Army wants to determine the amount of head trauma soldiers receive while in combat.

"There has been tremendous interest in better understanding the biomechanics of brain injury following both blunt trauma and blast events," Simbex founder Richard Greenwald said. The technology is … Read more