Experienced professionals tend to be better than rookies partly because they know how to use the tools of their trade more effectively. Cytologists who evaluate cells under a microscope become more consistent and accurate when they know how to prep their apparatus to produce clear images. Researchers at Duke University have now given a microscope [ (Read more...)
Tag: Pathology
Optical Coherence Tomography Finally Used to Measure Cartilage Health
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an imaging modality that provides a micron-level look at the tissues being examined. It is used in ophthalmology to assess the eyes and for imaging the interior of arteries to help with atherectomies. Although OCT has significant potential to help clinicians evaluate the health of tissues, it has proven difficu (Read more...)
Low Cost Turbidity Measurements Using a Fitness Tracker
Continuous monitoring of bacterial growth is a critical step in the biotechnology industry and in biological labs. These measurements are typically taken using large and bulky spectrophotometers that do not fit into incubators for real-time monitoring. Moreover, continuous monitoring is labor-intensive as it requires multiple samplings. Recent deve (Read more...)
AI Diagnoses Leukemia from Blood Samples as Well as Human Cytologists
A good deal of clinical diagnostics are effectively performed by cytologists who examine cells through a microscope for signs of disease. This is an imperfect, slow process that depends on the training, focus, and attention to detail of the cytologist. Now, researchers at Helmholtz Zentrum München and the University Hospital of LMU Munich in G (Read more...)
Graphene Imaging Platform to Track Stem Cell Differentiation
Stem cells hold a great deal of promise in treating a huge variety of human diseases. Although much hyped to the general public some years ago, it turned out to be very difficult to safely use stem cells to generate replacement tissues without inadvertently introducing tumors or other maladies. Knowing how stem cells differentiate, and […]
3D Printed Liquid Biopsy Device Captures Most Cancer Cells
Circulating tumor cells can point to the existence of cancer and provide information about its progression. Capturing these cells remains a tricky process. Dozens of devices have been developed that do their best to grab onto only the cancer cells being looked for, but they all suffer from problems such as poor efficiency, damage to […]
Controllable Microswimmers Move Around Individual Cells in 3D
Manipulating individual cells and microscopic particles may be extremely valuable for testing new therapies, targeting tumors, and for studying the underlying causes of disease, but it is very difficult to directly manipulate individual cells within an environment shared with other cells. A collaboration of researchers from University of California (Read more...)
Tiny Medical Imaging Sensor Sets Guinness World Record
OmniVision Technologies, a Santa Clara, California firm, just announced that it has won the Guinness World Record for “The Smallest Commercially Available Image Sensor”. The OV6948 sensor was designed for use in catheters and endoscopes, allowing these devices to be as small as possible while also providing high quality imaging from wit (Read more...)
Chip to Evaluate Health of Immune System from Blood Sample
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...)
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...)
Hyperspectral Surgical Microscope to See Cancer Cells in Real Time
Since internal cancerous tumors usually look exactly like the healthy tissues around them, frozen section analysis is used during and after surgeries to confirm that the entirety of a tumor has been removed. This is a slow process that often leads to patients requiring follow-up procedures. Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have [&he (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...)
Temporary Medical Tattoos of Anatomy, Injuries, Pathologies
Part of the difficulty in training the public in how to respond to medical emergencies is that many don’t understand the human anatomy below the skin. Moreover, knowing what different conditions actually look like on the body is another problem. Knowing where arteries run and where muscles connect to bone, as well as how bruises, […]
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...)
Hydrogel Mimics of Heart Tissue to Study Cardiac Reshaping Following Aortic Valve Implantation
Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedures have become a popular way of treating aortic valve stenosis, a condition in which the valve stiffens and worsens cardiac function. Following implantation of a prosthetic valve, the hearts of patients tend to undergo significant reconstruction around the treatment site, but the mechanics of th (Read more...)
Minimally Invasive Biopsies Provide Maximum Pathology Data
Current pathology techniques for analyzing biopsy tissues are lacking in their ability to detect cancer in small samples. Being able to rapidly study the distribution of protein expression within cells, gathered from minuscule samples, could be an important tool for early diagnosis and monitoring of cancer. Now, researchers at National University o (Read more...)
Multicolor Activated Fluorescent Dyes Thanks to Single Atom Replacement
Fluorescent dyes have transformed biomedical science. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2008, for example, was given for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein, GFP. Ever since GFP became available, scientists have been working on improving fluorescent dyes to better study dynamic processes within biological tissues. Typically, u (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 […]
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...)