Knowing how well a patient’s immune system is functioning may be very useful in diagnosing a disease and guiding the course of therapy. Researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore are making this a reality, having developed a hybrid chip that assesses the health of white blood cells in a whole blood sample. The microfluidic (Read more...)
Tag: Diagnostics
Contact-Free Baby Monitor Uses White Noise to Monitor Breathing
Echolocation technologies can detect objects by measuring how long it takes sound to bounce off them. This is used to detect submarines underwater, but now to also measure a child’s breathing while delivering soothing, and sleep inducing, white noise. Next week, researchers from the University of Washington will be at the MobiCom 2019 confere (Read more...)
3D Liquid-Cell Electron Microscopy Imaging Now Possible
Electron microscopy revealed a world that exists at scales smaller than the wavelength of light. Advancements in this field have allowed scientists to visualize ever more objects and processes, but actually seeing living cells in 3D and within a liquid environment has been impossible. Now, a team of researchers from Penn State University, Virginia (Read more...)
Microfluidic Device for Rapid Lyme Disease Diagnosis
Researchers at Columbia University have developed a microfluidic device that can diagnose Lyme disease in as little as 15 minutes. The device is particularly accurate in identifying antibody biomarkers that are present during early stage Lyme disease, raising hopes that it could be useful in detecting cases of early infection in a doctor’s of (Read more...)
iRhythm-Verily Partnership: Interview with iRhythm CEO Kevin King
iRhythm and Verily announced a partnership last month to “co-develop solutions intended to provide early warning, diagnosis and management for patients, particularly for those with silent or undiagnosed AF.” We spoke with iRhythm CEO Kevin King to understand how the two companies complement each other and how they can solve the problem (Read more...)
Low Power MRI Helps Image Lungs, Brings Costs Down
Modern clinical MRIs usually have magnetic field strengths of 1.5 or 3.0 Tesla. These are pretty powerful magnets and it’s the reason that these devices are very expensive. While such strengths have been standard for a long time, the internal hardware and software beyond the magnets have been improving steadily. Now, researchers affiliated wi (Read more...)
Printing Custom Flexible Electronics Directly Onto Skin, Bandages, Medical Devices
Flexible electronics have the potential to help monitor, and even modulate, a number of physiological parameters. While stick-on heart monitors can be manufactured as one-size-fits-all, in applications such as electronic bandages that can monitor and treat a wound, it’s best to be able to create custom devices that suit each patient’s n (Read more...)
New Imaging Technique Reveals Deep Tumors, Helps Attack Them
Tumors deep inside the body can be very difficult to spot, track, and study. The brain, being surrounded by a thick skull, is particularly challenging to image using light, so MRI and CT are currently the go-to imaging modalities when looking at deeply seated tissues. Now, researchers at Stanford University are reporting the development of [&hellip (Read more...)
Disc Pump for Less Obtrusive Ambulatory Blood Pressure Systems
TTP Ventus, the UK-based developer of the Disc Pump, has recently begun working on a new application for this technology – ambulatory blood pressure systems. The company claims that the Disc Pump, which is a miniaturized, quiet, and highly efficient pump, could revolutionize ambulatory blood pressure measurements. At present, 24-hour blood pr (Read more...)
Nanoparticles Inside Samples of Mucus to Measure COPD Development
Management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) suffers not only from a lack of effective therapies, but also from an inability to track the disease’s progression. Spirometers that measure how much air patients can displace using their lungs are the “gold standard,” but that standard is pretty poor in helping to predict (Read more...)
Using FibroScan in The Clinic: Interview with Dr. Stephen A. Harrison
EchoSens creates non-invasive liver diagnosis medical devices. The company’s line of products, called FibroScan, work by measuring the speed of ultrasound waves as they move through liver tissue. This measurement can tell us about the state of the liver. For example, ultrasound waves move faster through fibrotic/scarred livers. EchoSens recen (Read more...)
New Chip for Microwave Imaging of Body
Today’s clinicians are limited to a few imaging modalities, primarily X-ray, CT, MRI, and ultrasound. Microwaves, in principle, can also be used as a useful way to look inside the body. Microwave radiation is non-ionizing, so should be safer than X-rays, but in practice microwave imagers, because of the electronics inside, have remained bulky (Read more...)
Flexible Vitals Sensors Made from Graphene Sensitized with Quantum Dots
At the ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences, in Catalonia, Spain, researchers have come up with a way to use graphene to make flexible photodetectors to measure heart rate, blood oxygen concentration, and breathing rate. Additionally, the technology can also be used to measure UV levels coming from the Sun and to communicate the [&hellip (Read more...)
Smart Phyjamas for Monitoring Physiological Signals at Night
Researchers from University of Massachusetts at Amherst have developed a new smart pajama, dubbed Phyjama, that can track physiological signals during sleep. Their work demonstrates that the technology can reliably measure heart rate, breathing rate, and sleep position during the course of the night. One day, advances like this can be incorporated (Read more...)
Ultrasound Otoscope to Help Diagnose Middle Ear Infections
Diagnosing infections of the middle ear is prone to a great deal of subjectivity. Antibiotics being the typical treatment option, way too many patients are treated who are actually not infected. This can result in the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and a host of other problems. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Micr (Read more...)
Non-Invasive Liver Assessment: Interview with Echosens’ New CEO Dominique Legros
Echosens is a medical device company based in Paris, France that’s focused on diagnosing liver disease. Their technology, called FibroScan, uses ultrasonic waves to non-invasively measure the elasticity and absorption of the liver. These measurements can inform medical care teams about the amount of scar tissue and fatty content in a patient& (Read more...)
Gold Nanoclusters Power a Simple Cancer Urine Test
Researchers at Imperial College London and MIT have developed a simple cancer urine test based on injected gold nano-clusters which enter the urine only in the presence of cancer. So far, the researchers have used the test to detect colon cancer in mice. A positive result is indicated through a simple color change, meaning that […]
Nanoscale Light Manipulation for Detection of Tiny Pathogens
Viruses are so small that to be able to detect them using light you need instruments that work on the nanoscale. Sensors so perfect are very hard to make, as most manufacturing processes disrupt nanoscale structures. Now, a team at Purdue University has developed a way to combine 3D plasmonic nanoarrays, special light manipulation devices, [&hellip (Read more...)
Handheld MasSpec Pen for Molecular Cancer Detection During Surgeries
Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new handheld pen for rapid intraoperative cancer detection. Their work demonstrates that the tool can identify different molecular profiles between cancerous and non-cancerous tissue without harming the sampled tissues. This exciting development can one day improve cancer diagnosis (Read more...)
Automatic Artificial Intelligence System Learns to Diagnose Disease
Wearable health monitors, ubiquitous sensors, and the ability to collect and store huge amounts of data are creating challenges for researchers hoping to use artificial intelligence to identify diseases. While the gathered data can hold important clinical answers, finding those answers means that the data must be categorized and labeled. Now, resea (Read more...)