Stand-up wheelchair: The folks at the design news blog Yanko Designs seem to have an affinity for wheelchair designs and posted another iteration of the idea, this one by designer Tim Leeding. His concept is of a wheelchair that can be manually transitioned to a standing position to allow more normal social interactions. Read more in the Yanko blog post, including a discussion with the designer about how his design distinguishes itself from similar stand-up wheelchairs, such as with the apparatus’ gearbox that facillitates propulsion.
MRI provides real-time video of moving organs and joints: Moving images of the heart and other organs generated from magnetic resonance imaging are nothing new. However, up until now these videos were always reconstructed afterwards by combining signals and images from the same cardiac phase acquired during breath-holding. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen have proven it is possible to acquire images in real-time with up to fifty frames per second. Previously it was only possible to acquire images at a maximum rate of about one per second. They used a combination of fast low angle shot (FLASH) gradient-echo imaging sequences, radial encoding and an iterative image reconstruction by regularized nonlinear inversion to greatly speed up imaging. The main improvement lays in the iterative reconstruction, which has previously been used for reducing CT radiation dose, but has now shown to be very useful in MRI as well. The possibility to do real-time dynamic imaging opens up a lot of new opportunities for MR imaging, including swallowing studies, cardiac and abdominal imaging without breath-holding and interventional procedures using MRI. In principle this technique is possible to implement on most current scanners, however, the main limitation is the amount of computing power required to perform the real-time reconstruction. Currently one minute of images requires half an hour to process. However, the authors expect improvements in the image reconstruction algorithms for parallelized GPU’s, and other improvements, to reduce reconstruction time and improve image quality. The researchers published the results online in the journal NMR in Biomedicine.
Correlating brain signals to actual words: Researchers from the University of Utah showed that they can detect articulated words from signals received by electrodes on the brain’s surface. This might one day enable patients with locked-in syndrome to communicate with their surroundings. The researchers used grids of microelectrodes placed on the cortical surface over speech centers during craniotomy in a patient with severe epileptic seizures. The microelectrodes consisted of 16 nonpenetrating microwires at millimetre intervals in a 4×4 grid pattern. The devices recorded local field potentials from the surface of face motor cortex and Wernicke’s area. Brain signals corresponding to ten different words were analyzed: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less. Accurately distinguishing between two different words, suc as yes and no, was possible up to ninety percent of the time, while accuracy dropped to forty-eight percent when distinguishing between all ten words. These results were achieved without any patient training. There is still plenty of opportunity to improve on these results while reducing invasiveness. The scientists working on the project go as far as to speculate about wireless systems able to record high-resolution cortical surface potentials functioning as brain-computer interfaces. The researchers published the resutls in the September issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering.
Study: less access to abortion translates to higher internet search rates: Using Google Trends for epidemiology and public health research is a cheap and simple way to determine what a regional populace is interested in. Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston wanted to know if populations that had less access to abortion wanted to know more or less about it, as judged by numbers of Google searches for “abortion.” They found: “Results Our initial integrative analysis found that, both in the US and internationally, the volume of Internet searches for abortion is inversely proportional to local abortion rates and directly proportional to local restrictions on abortion. Conclusion: These findings are consistent with published evidence that local restrictions on abortion lead individuals to seek abortion services outside of their area. Further validation of these methods has the potential to produce a timely, complementary data source for studying the effects of health policies.” Those wanting to practice their amateur epidemiology skills can do their own trend analysis at Google Insights.
A weekly roundup of new developments in medical technology, by MedGadget.com.