Archives: 2006

Medgadget Exclusive / Net News

The 2006 Medical Weblog Awards Nominees

by Gene Ostrovsky on Dec 29, 2006 • 3:00 pm

award lr The 2006 Medical Weblog Awards Nominees

With the latest additions, and for your consideration, here is the current list of 2006 Medical Weblog Awards nominees:
  • Best Medical Weblog


    • Aetiology
    Biomedicine on Display
    Doctor Anonymous
    Dr. Deborah Serani
    Effect Measure
    Emergiblog
    The Examining Room of Dr. Charles
    Fingers and Tubes in Every Orifice
    Flea
    From Medskool
    impactEDnurse
    Kevin, M.D.
    Kidney Notes
    The Last Psychiatrist
    Musings of a Distractible Mind
    NHS Blog Doctor
    Respectful Insolence
    ScienceRoll
    Shrink Rap
    Surgeon’s Blog
    Trick-cycling For Beginners
    Unintelligent Design
    The Well Timed Period

  • Best New Medical Weblog (established in 2006)


    • Applied Genomics & Molecular Medicine
    BernardChan.Net
    Bitácora Médica
    Breath Spa for Kids
    Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry: A Closer Look
    Docinthemachine
    Doctor Anonymous
    The Doctor Blogger
    Fingers and Tubes in Every Orifice
    Flea
    Fruit of the Womb
    impactEDnurse
    The Independent Urologist
    In the Room
    Is there a doctor in the house?
    Junkfood Science
    Just Up The Dose
    Medicine for the Outdoors
    Musings of a Dinosaur
    Ob/Gyn Kenobi
    Odysseys of George
    Pound of Cure
    PsychSplash
    Radiology Picture of the Day
    ScienceRoll
    Shrink Rap
    Sisyphus’ Ledge
    Surgeon’s Blog
    Teen Health 411
    That Med School Guy
    The Thoughts of Artemis
    Trench Doc
    Tundra Medicine Dreams

  • Best Literary Medical Weblog


    • Barbados Butterfly
    Biomedicine on Display
    The Blog Of Dysfunction
    The Cheerful Oncologist
    Digital Doorway
    Dr Dork
    Dr. Hébert’s Medical Gumbo
    Emergiblog
    The Examining Room of Dr. Charles
    Intueri
    NHS Blog Doctor
    Odysseys of George
    One Year of Writing and Healing
    Surgeon’s Blog
    Trick-cycling For Beginners
    Tundra Medicine Dreams

  • Best Clinical Sciences Weblog


    • Anxiety, Addiction and Depression Treatments
    Applied Genomics & Molecular Medicine
    Clinical Cases and Images
    Corpus Callosum
    Dare To Dream
    Inside Surgery
    Radiology Picture of the Day

  • Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog


    • Effect Measure
    From Medskool
    Health Business Blog
    Hospital Impact
    InsureBlog
    Kevin, M.D.
    Managed Care Matters
    Health Care Renewal
    MSSPNexus Blog
    Neonatal Doc
    NHS Blog Doctor
    The Well Timed Period

  • Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog


    • Biomedicine on Display
    Clinical Cases and Images
    Docinthemachine
    Emergency Gadget
    ESAO – Liver Support Working Group Blog
    The Healthcare IT Guy
    HIStalk
    Informaticopia
    Kidney Notes
    Odysseys of George
    Positive Technology Journal
    Tech Medicine

  • Best Patient’s Blog


    • auspiciousdragon.net
    Bipolar Mo
    Brain Hell
    colinportnuff
    Diabetes Mine
    Dream Mom
    Furious Seasons
    The Furry Monkey
    GrrlScientist
    High Point Regional Health Center Patient Blogs
    My Cancer Fight
    Puddlejumper’s Bipolar World
    Six Until Me
    Trick-cycling For Beginners
    The Trouble With Spikol
    UPDATE: Vote now!
    The 2006 Medical Weblog Awards announcement…

    Art

    Eye of Science

    by Gene Ostrovsky on Dec 29, 2006 • 9:13 am

    978645life Eye of ScienceEye of Science (EOS) is an online portfolio of microscopic images by Oliver Meckes, a photographer, and biologist Nicole Ottawa.

    As a two-person team of photographer and biologist, our aim is to combine scientific exactness with aesthetic appearances, and thereby help to bridge the gap between the world of science and the world of art. We are committed to the rigorous standards of scientific investigation, but also to the use of color as a creative and harmonious tool to achieve beauty. By combining science and aesthetics we hope to enthuse our audience. Day after day we explore fascinating forms and structures in a world beyond human vision.

    Check out their magnificent photos at Eye of Science…
    (hat tip: digg)

    Military Medicine

    Iraq War Medicine

    by Gene Ostrovsky on Dec 29, 2006 • 8:53 am

    This month’s feature article at the National Geographic magazine is a report by Neil Shea and James Nachtwey from the frontlines of medicine practice, on the battlefields of Iraq.
    From the article:

    But then, war medicine is not civilian medicine. It’s dirtier, faster. The wounds are worse, the patients at greater risk. Here medical teams cut, crack, and inject where their civilian counterparts might pause and worry about lawsuits. Ibn Sina is designed for life-saving procedures, not the long recoveries required by amputees or burn victims. The mission is simple: stabilize patients, ship them on to facilities equipped for longer term care.
    “There are no litigious restrictions over here,” a lieutenant colonel who is also a doctor tells me. “People play fearlessly, and when they play fearlessly, they make fewer mistakes. It’s a dose of reality you’ll never forget. The surgeons, nurses–never in the rest of their lives will they be who they are here.”

    Link…

    Ob/Gyn / Surgery

    UltraSound CT™ Imaging System: Paid by You and Me

    by Gene Ostrovsky on Dec 29, 2006 • 8:23 am

    89789poop UltraSound CT™ Imaging System: Paid by You and MeTechniScan Medical Systems, a private Salt Lake City company, is reporting receiving $2.8 million from National Institutes of Health to further develop the company’s technology of noninvasive ultrasound-based breast cancer diagnostics. The Medgadget team is perplexed why such promising technology can’t find its own investors and needs to be supported by hard working American taxpayers, who have nothing to do with the UltraSound CT™ Imaging System.
    Despite this disgusting fact of parasitism, here are some fact sabout the technology, as reported by the company:

    The UltraSound CT™ Imaging System is an automated, fully digital, breast imaging device that uses transmission ultrasound to produce two unique images of the breast; one based on the speed of sound and one based on the attenuation of sound. The system’s key features include the ability to scan the whole breast and produce high resolution 3D images, which provide for easier, more accurate localization and characterization of areas identified as requiring further workup after mammography or conventional ultrasound.
    The quality of the images generated by the system is completely independent of operator skill and experience (unlike conventional breast ultrasound), and, unlike mammography, UltraSound CT uses no ionizing radiation and does not require breast compression. These benefits combine to provide additional information which can result in greater diagnostic confidence for radiologists and a safe and comfortable breast exam for women…
    The UltraSound CT™ System produces two sets of images for each breast — speed of sound and attenuation of sound. Each image set is made up of a series of coronal slices of the breast from the nipple to near the chest wall at 2mm increments.
    The speed of sound images and the attenuation of sound images are created from a single data set of transmission ultrasound signals processed with proprietary inverse scattering algorithms. Therefore, the two sets of images are perfectly correlated to each other.
    The breast is scanned without compression so the location of any lesion or abnormality on the images can be directly correlated to its location in the physical breast.

    Medgadget, a private and proudly independent bottom feeding website, has contacted the company to provide images of the system. The company has choosen to ignore our readers, so here’s a link to the taxpayer-sponsored video of the system…
    Company’s site…

    Uncategorized

    2007!

    by Gene Ostrovsky on Dec 29, 2006 • 8:16 am

    happy new 2007!
    The very best wishes from the Medgadget team to all of our readers. May you have a safe, healthy and prosperous new year!

    Genetics

    3D Stem Cell Cultures in Self-Assembling Peptide Nanofiber Scaffolds

    by Gene Ostrovsky on Dec 29, 2006 • 7:33 am

    87880fee 3D Stem Cell Cultures in Self Assembling Peptide Nanofiber Scaffolds
    Scientists from MIT and their Italian colleagues (University of Milan, University of Milan-Bicocca, and Fondazione Centro San Raffaele del Monte Tabor) are reporting a breakthrough in the ability of scientists to construct a 3D scaffolding medium in which to grow stem cells. As reported in the latest issue of PLoS One, investigators were able to grow a “healthy colony” of adult mouse stem cells in the construct made out of self-organising peptides:

    Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering, is a pioneer in coaxing tiny fragments of amino acids called self-assembling peptides to organize themselves into useful structures. Working with visiting graduate student Fabrizio Gelain from Milan, Zhang created a designer scaffold from a network of protein nanofibers, each 5,000 times thinner than a human hair and containing pores up to 20,000 times smaller than the eye of a needle…
    In addition to helping researchers get a more accurate picture of how cells grow and behave in the body, the new synthetic structure can provide a more conducive microenvironment for tissue cell cultures and tissues used in regenerative medicine, such as skin grafts or neurons to replace brain cells lost to injury or disease.
    The scaffold itself can be transplanted directly into the body with no ill effects…
    With the addition of defined amino acid fragments called active motifs, the scaffold can be fashioned to coax stem cells to behave in certain desirable ways-such as differentiating into needed body tissues or migrating toward bone marrow and other natural destinations.
    “What makes these designer scaffolds particularly interesting is that cells survive longer and differentiate better without additional soluble growth factors,” Zhang said. “This suggests that extracellular microenvironments may play a more important role for cell survival and for carrying out cell functions than previously thought.”
    The active motif method could be readily adapted to studying cell-to-cell interaction, cell migrations, tumor and cancer cell interaction with normal cells, cell-based drug testing and other diverse applications.
    “I believe that in the next 20 years all cell cultures will be in 3D with the designer scaffolds, and most textbooks about cell biology will have to be revised when people obtain results from 3D cell culture studies,” Zhang said.

    Link…
    Paper…

    in the news...

    Medgadget Legend: Mark Knudson

    by Justin Barad on Dec 29, 2006 • 1:04 am

    There’s an interesting article for those of you interested in the bitter world of medical device entrepreneurship. This guy, Mark Knudson, makes invention look quite easy. He might even be rubbing it in your faces! His inventions include the pillar system for sleep apnea.
    So read this article by Dick Youngblood (…no comment) for inspiration, and then strap on your work gloves and get down to the idea shop.
    Dick Youngblood’s article at Kitsap Sun…

    Medicine

    New Implantable Optical Glucose Sensor

    by Josh Umbehr on Dec 28, 2006 • 5:44 am

    If the ‘cure for diabetes‘ doesn’t pass successfully through clinical trials, at least diabetics wouldn’t have to prick themselves to check their blood sugar. That is, if professor Gerald Loeb and his team of researchers at the University of Southern California perfect their implantable optical glucose sensor.

    Researchers led by Gerald Loeb, a biomedical-engineering professor at the University of Southern California, are now working on a glucose-sensor design based on optical technology. The design shows promise for making sensitive, affordable, and less invasive sensors.
    The technique involves measuring the change in fluorescent emissions that occurs when glucose binds to certain molecules. The sensor is a tiny optical fiber that could be implanted in a patient’s skin. To read glucose concentrations, a portable analyzer will shine ultraviolet light into the free end of the fiber and measure the fluorescence, says Loeb.
    Attached to the end of the fiber inside the skin is a polyethylene-glycol polymer matrix interspersed with pairs of tightly bound chemicals, each tagged with a different fluorescent molecule. Under ultraviolet light, the bound molecules shine at one wavelength. When the researchers place the matrix in a glucose solution, glucose molecules knock out and replace one of the chemicals, dextran. As a result, the chemical complex starts emitting at two different wavelengths. The ratio of the fluorescence intensities at the two wavelengths is in proportion to the glucose concentration.
    According to Loeb, the sensor should be cheap and disposable. “Essentially, it’s a dot of polymerized goop on the end of an optical fiber,” he says. “A few-centimeters-long optical fiber is going to be pennies, and the dot of goop would be even less.”
    It might also be more reliable than existing devices, because the chemistry doesn’t consume glucose. Commercially available implantable sensors measure the voltage caused by a chemical reaction that consumes glucose. If the concentration around the sensor goes down, and glucose from the surrounding tissue doesn’t flow in quickly enough, one could be measuring a value that is lower than the actual concentration in the body, Loeb says.

    Full article at MIT’s Technology Review . . .

    Ob/Gyn / Surgery

    FDA Humanitarian Device Approval for Fetal Surgery

    by Josh Umbehr on Dec 28, 2006 • 12:26 am

    Dr. Palter over at Docinthemachine, has an excellent piece about the FDA’s humanitarian device exemption (HDE) program, and how it has recently approved Karl Storz Fetoscopy Instrument Sets for the treatment of twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS).

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