Last month, Medgadget announced the development of the Magnifi iPhone adapter from start-up Arcturus Labs (Palo Alto, CA), which connects your iPhone 4 or 4S to optical instruments ranging from microscopes to binoculars and telescopes.

To learn more about the evolution of the Magnifi, we spoke with newlyweds Xianne and Isaac Penny who came up with the rough idea for the device while in grad school at Stanford University. They began the development of the product after graduating. Isaac Penny also worked as an engineer at Intuitive Surgical (Sunnyvale, CA), where he helped create the daVinci Single-Site line of instruments.

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For most people blood tests are synonymous with needle-sticks. However, researchers from the biomedical engineering department at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) may have found a way to take the pain out of some of our blood tests in the future. The researchers have developed a new microscope that can non-invasively image individual blood cells.

The microscope uses spectrally encoded confocal microscopy (SECM), a technique which allows for 2D spatial imaging of the blood cells. In order to image the moving blood cells, a probe is pressed against the skin which generates a line spectrum of light from red to violet. As blood cells near the surface of the skin cross the projected spectrum they scatter the light, which is collected by the probe and analyzed to generate 2D images of the blood cells.

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During our recent tour of Northeast Indiana, we had the opportunity to visit F Cubed (F3), a startup supported by the Innovation Park at Notre Dame. F3 is developing a portable device that allows for rapid detection of DNA of harmful pathogens in under 30 minutes.

We’ve written about a number of similar lab-on-chip detectors, but what sets the F3 system apart is its biochip technology. F3′s biochip, which is smaller than the size of a thumbnail, allows for the detection of multiple pathogens without the use of expensive and complicated optical devices. According to F3,

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Back in February, we wrote about Altapure‘s adaptation of military sonar technology to sterilize clinical environments. During our recent trip to northeast Indiana, we had the opportunity to visit Altapure’s home on the campus of the University of Notre Dame.

Since our last mention, Altapure has been able to not only get their product on the market, but is already working on a newer version of the device that clocks in at 1/3 the size of the current model but has the same power.

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This past week, Medgadget was invited to take a tour of Northeast Indiana, a region of ten counties surrounding and encompassing the city of Fort Wayne. You might already know about Warsaw, about 30 miles from Fort Wayne, as the headquarters for DePuy, Biomet, Zimmer, and a number of other companies that make the city the leading orthopedic device leader in the world. However, the rest of Northeast Indiana has also been evolving into a thriving medical device manufacturing hub, as labor is available, land is plentiful, and the region is very open and friendly toward the medical device manufacturing industry. In fact, according to the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership, our host for the two day tour, the region has consistently been a leader in terms of dollars invested and jobs created in the industry. Over two days, we toured a number of different companies and talked to a number of executives about what makes their businesses successful and why they’re at a good place being in Northeast Indiana.

Our first stop was Micropulse, a contract manufacturer of implants and instruments for a number of large medical device clients. Micropulse was originally founded to produce parts for the automotive industry, but in the early 2000′s, founder and CEO Brian Emerick saw his business growing stagnant, and so he switched to medical devices and has never looked back since. What’s interesting about Micropulse is that its facilities are also headquarters to the OrthoVation Center, a new incubator for Emerick’s other medical product ventures. The OrthoVation Center currently is home to four companies: Del Palma Orthopedics, Nanovis, BioSpine, and Sites Medical.

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Researchers from UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Medicine have designed a system that can harness distant groups of people to analyze pathology images for signs of disease. They tested the ability of non-professionals to quickly learn to detect malaria when looking at images of red blood cells and have shown that if necessary, with a bit of help from online crowds, large groups of people can potentially be screened for the disease.

The system they built relies on video gaming to attract people to do the visual tasks necessary to spot malaria.  The study subjects, mostly untrained newbie undergrads, showed a spotting ability that was within 1.25 percent of medical professionals.

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Over at the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), researchers have developed a special scanning electron microscope (SEM) capable of generating high-resolution 3D images of the study subject. 3D SEM is actually not new technology, however, the JST SEM is the first device of its kind that can show 3D images in real-time. The secret is a special electromagnetic lens that slants an electron beam aimed at a specimen, which results in instant left and right parallax images needed to create a 3D effect. Normal 3D SEM imaging techniques require the left and right parallax images to be taken separately and at different angles.

If you have a pair of red/blue 3D glasses, be sure to take a look at the above anaglyph of a piece of metal, produced by the JST SEM.

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Malignant cells are different from regular cells in their biochemistry as well as in their morphology. Studying physical properties of such cells can often be more advantageous than looking at their biochemical characteristics because labeling is not required and sample preparation is easier to perform.

Scanning through thousands of cells to spot a cancerous one requires a fast device, and researchers at UCLA have developed one called deformability cytometer that can effectively “feel” around the entire perimeter of individual cells, using a liquid flow trap, at 2,000 cells per second.

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A team of researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada has developed a new DNA analysis system capable of performing up to 20 simultaneous tests. The system, dubbed the Domino, uses polymerase chain reaction technology to amplify and identify specific DNA sequences.

Like many point of care diagnostic technologies, the Domino consists of a bench top unit and a disposable microfluidic cartridge containing an array of twenty gel posts. Each of the posts acts as a separate interface to a single sample of blood allowing several genetic tests to be performed simultaneously. The Domino may be used to screen for specific diseases or to determine genetic resistance to particular medication.

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Laboratories around the world full of microscopes continue to function without an easy way to capture images in the eyepieces. Struggling lab techs that dreamed of being artists end up drawing much of what they see with their eyes, the same way the lab techs have done for generations.

Now Xianne and Isaac Penny, designers out of Palo Alto, CA, have developed an iPhone case that makes it easy to snap the phone’s camera in front of an eyepiece and quickly capture images for further use. The same adapter case can be used with telescopes, binoculars, and other optical devices.

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