3D printer creates new jaw for woman

"This is a world premiere, the first time a patient?specific implant has replaced the entire lower jaw," Jules Poukens of the University of Hasselt in Belgium said. "It's a cautious, but firm step."

A Belgium woman is able to chew, speak and breathe normally after the implantation of a new jawbone created on a 3D printer, doctors say.

The replacement jaw, created out of a fine titanium powder sculpted layer by layer by a precision laser beam, has proved a successful substitute for her own jaw all but destroyed by a potent infection called osteomyelitis..

Poukens and fellow researchers collaborated with a 3D printing firm called Layerwise in Leuven, Belgium, which specializes in printing with ultrastrong titanium to make dental implants and facial and spinal bone implants.

An MRI scan of the patient's jawbone was fed into a laser sintering 3D printer which fused tiny titanium particles layer by layer until the shape of her jawbone was recreated, then it was coated in a biocompatible ceramic layer.

The four-hour jaw implant operation was a success, researchers said.

"Shortly after waking up from the anesthetic the patient spoke a few words, and the day after was able to speak and swallow normally again," Poukens said.

Osteomyelitis: Causes, incidence, and risk factors

This severe Bone infection can be caused by bacteria (more common) or fungi (less common).

• Infection may spread to a bone from infected skin, muscles, or tendons next to the bone, as in osteomyelitis that occurs under a chronic skin ulcer (sore).
• The infection that causes osteomyelitis can also start in another part of the body and spread to the bone through the blood.
• A current or past injury may have made the affected bone more likely to develop the infection. A bone infection can also start after bone surgery, especially if the surgery is done after an injury or if metal rods or plates are placed in the bone.

Inner Space: New system may one day steer microrobots through blood vessels

Microscopic-scale medical robots represent a promising new type of therapeutic technology.

As envisioned, the microbots, which are less than one millimeter in size, might someday be able to travel throughout the human bloodstream to deliver drugs to specific targets or seek out and destroy tumors, blood clots, and infections that can't be easily accessed in other ways.

One challenge in the deployment of microbots, however, is developing a system to accurately "drive" them and maneuver them through the complex and convoluted circulatory system, to a chosen destination.

Researchers from Korea's Hanyang University in Seoul and Chonnam National University in Gwangju now describe, in the AIP's Proceedings of the 56th Annual Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, a new navigation system that uses an external magnetic field to generate two distinct types of microbot movements: "helical", or corkscrew-like, motions, which propel the microbots forward or backward, or even allow them to "dig" into blood clots or other obstructions; and "translational," or side-to-side motions, which allow the 'bots to, for example, veer into one side of a branched artery.

In lab tests, the researchers used the system to accurately steer a microbot through a mock blood vessel filled with water.

The work, the researchers say, could be extended to the "precise and effective manipulation of a microbot in several organs of the human body, such as the central nervous system, the urinary system, the eye, and others.

Video: A scientist makes cheap, effective medical devices from toys

As you may remember, I interviewed Jose Gomez-Marquez for this blog in October of last year.

He’s certainly one of the more creative scientists I’ve come across.

In some ways, Gomez-Marquez is like the MacGyver of medical inventions.

Gomez-Marquez is program director for MIT’s Innovations in International Health, an initiative that shows medical professionals in the developing world that they can use ordinary household items to make their own medical devices.

Playing with toys allows Gomez-Marquez to think outside the box and dream up new solutions to new vaccines and other medical technologies.

The Boston-based MIT scientist was in the Bay Area, so I asked him to come in for an interview at CNET’s headquarters (which is also home to SmartPlanet).

During the interview, Gomez-Marquez shows off several products, including a nebulizer powered by a bike pump, printable diagnostics and lab-on-chip devices made in the mold of Lego bricks.

Check out a more detailed blog post on CNET.

Mobile app diagnoses malaria from a single drop of blood

The virtual ink had barely dried on our story about the Skin Scan app for diagnosing melanoma when we received word of another, equally compelling mobile diagnostic tool.

Focusing this time on the millions of people at risk from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world, Lifelens is a project that has created a smartphone app to diagnose the insidious, mosquito-borne disease.

More than one million people die each year from Malaria, and roughly 85 percent of them are children under the age of 5, the Lifelens project notes. The most prevalent diagnostic tool, meanwhile, is the rapid diagnostic test (RDT), which is known to be associated with a 60 percent incidence rate of false positive results.

That, in turn, results in the treatment of many people who don’t actually have Malaria, driving up the costs of anti-Malaria treatment significantly. The Lifelens project, on the other hand, aims to make the process both cheaper and more accurate by analyzing blood digitally instead.

Specifically, once blood is stained to reveal the Malaria parasites, the project’s smartphone app can analyze a magnified image of a drop of blood captured via simple finger prick, including counting the various types of cells it includes. Malarial parasites are among those it can identify, making false results much less likely.

Once analysis is complete, data is uploaded to the Web, where it can be mapped for a high-level view of where Malaria outbreaks are occurring.

The video below demonstrates Lifelens in action:

AnatOnMe projects patients' insides onto their outsides

A team at Microsoft's research wing has developed a working prototype of a system that may help to encourage physical injury sufferers to do their exercises by giving them a clearer understanding of what's going on.

A therapist would use the device to project a series of graphics of underlying bone, muscle tissue, tendons or nerves directly onto the body of a patient to help explain the nature of the injury and prescribe effective treatment.

The device can also take photos during a consultation, which can be subsequently reviewed or printed out as a memory aid for the patient.

It is estimated that up to half of patients undergoing physical therapy for chronic conditions fail to comply with the recommended therapies, and effective communication between patient and practitioner is seen as a major influence for compliance with prescribed exercise regimens.

The team of Amy K. Karlson and Daniel Wigdor from Microsoft Research, and PhD student intern Tao Ni from Virginia Tech's Department of Computer Science, has created a system that could help to enhance such a therapist-patient information exchange.

The AnatOnMe projection-based handheld prototype is made up of two parts. The first consists of an Optoma PK102 pico projector, a Microsoft LifeCam digital webcam and a FireFly MV USB near-infrared camera.

The second is a modified Logitech R400 laser pointer which has had its red laser diode replaced by an IR laser diode, and some control buttons added. Both parts are connected to a laptop for processing.

The researchers put together a series of annotated graphic collections representing six injury types using stock graphics, three upper body and three lower body injuries that often require physical therapy.

Using this library, the therapist can project images onto a patient's body, a mannequin or a wall, to help the patient better understand an injury through 3D visualization of the problem and then to detail a recommended course of treatment.

Rather than creating a complicated automated system to line up the image with the area of injury, the prototype relies on the therapist to match the two by line of sight.

As the therapist gives exercise instruction, the camera could be used to photograph the patient performing the recommended exercises, and these photos could be compiled into an instruction sheet and printed off for the patient to take away.

It is hoped that giving patients a virtual view inside an affected area will encourage them to keep up their exercises.

Questions: When is the best time to go under the Knife?

Questions

1. Is it safer to have elective surgery first thing in the morning rather than in late afternoon, when doctors and nurses might be tired?



2. For the same reason, is it smarter to schedule surgery earlier in the workweek than later?



3. Is it better to avoid having elective surgery in July and August, when a new crop of residents has just started training?



4. Also, is it foolish to have elective surgery when the moon is full and, tradition has it, people can go a little off-kilter?

Answers

No, no, no and no, according to a Cleveland Clinic study that found timing isn't anything, at least when it comes to elective coronary bypass surgery.

The authors of the study, published today in the journal Anesthesiology, write that they decided to focus on elective heart bypass surgery because, thanks to "well-established protocols (for bypass surgery), there is much less variability than with other procedures." Plus, they write, "hospitals closely track morbidity and mortality for this operation", which is very encouraging. I am presuming that this is in an attempte to reduce it.

Daniel Sessler, an anesthesiologist who chairs the Cleveland Clinic's department of outcomes research, says he and his co-authors hope to examine whether timing affects other types of elective surgery, but they expect to find the same thing.

The researchers analysed the results of 18,597 elective bypass surgeries at the Cleveland Clinic from 1993 to 2006. Most were performed between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays. None of the time factors — hour, day, month or phase of moon — made any difference in the outcomes of the operations.

"Fatigue is well-known to impair performance," Sessler says, citing its role in plane and car crashes. "It's highly plausible that fatigue would impair the performance of medical personnel."

But, he says, just because doctors or nurses are fatigued and make mistakes doesn't necessarily mean patients suffer. "Hospitals have extensive systems in place to minimize the consequences of any error," he says.

I hope this has answered some of your questions but I suspect it may have raised a few more!

Medical scans can give nuclear-plant radiation doses - New Scientist

Medical scans can give nuclear-plant radiation doses - New Scientist

X-RAYS and CT scans expose a minority of Americans to radiation levels comparable to working in a nuclear power plant. We ask if such scans are really necessary or worth the risk?

Reza Fazel of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues looked at health insurance records for over 650,000 people who had at least one imaging procedure in a three-year period. Most received low doses of radiation, but around 2 per cent got doses equal to or above the suggested yearly exposure for someone working in a nuclear power plant (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 361, p 849). Fazel says further studies are needed to work out if such medical scans benefit or damage health overall.
Some patients got doses above the suggested levels for someone working in a nuclear power plant

Commenting on the research, radiologist James Thrall at Harvard Medical School points to a recent study reporting that medical imaging accounted for a one-year rise in life expectancy in the US between 1991 and 2004.

Shared via AddThis