Bovie Medical received FDA clearance for its J-Plasma handpiece with retractable cutting feature for coagulating soft tissue during surgeries. It is available for both open and laparoscopic procedures.

The device is powered by a previously approved Bovie GS electrosurgical generator.

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Intra-operative imaging has been helping surgeons work on patients with greater confidence and increased precision.

We had a chance to ask Amy Boyle, Executive Vice President, Marketing at IMRIS, about the benefits of intra-operative imaging, and specifically about the company’s VISIUS Surgical Theatre that comes with either CT or MRI scanner that can quickly slide in and out of the OR to image the patient on the table as needed.

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Cardinal Health has made available its Smart-Seal surgical mask that improves both its fit and reduces interior fogging while providing a high level of filtration and resistance to liquids.

From the announcement:

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HealthStream and Laerdal Medical launched a couple new products for managing and studying clinical simulations.

SimView allows for recording of simulation video, audio, data logs, and how the virtual patient responds to therapy. SimManager is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application that helps manage simulation routines from scheduling, to progress tracking, to delivering reports while tracking room and equipment availability.

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InterVapor, from Uptake Medical (Tustin, CA), is a non-surgical endoscopic lung volume reduction procedure that uses thermal ablation without leaving foreign materials in the lung. In clinical studies of patients with severe emphysema, InterVapor has demonstrated clinically meaningful improvements in breathing function, exercise capacity and quality of life. The company has now closed a Series C funding round, which will support commercialization of InterVapor for treatment of severe emphysema. This news comes on the heels of Uptake Medical receiving CE mark approval for InterVapor in September, completing the first commercial use of InterVapor in Germany in November, and recently announcing TGA approval for InterVapor to be marketed in Australia.

Steven Kesten, Chief Medical Officer at Uptake Medical, answered our questions about the company and its technology:

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PMD Healthcare has released its new portable spirometer that allows people with all kinds of lung conditions, like asthma, COPD and cystic fibrosis, to monitor their lung function.  The device can also provide reminders to take medications and perform tests, as well as to be used to conduct breathing exercises.

Data from the device can be uploaded via a computer for physicians to be able to analyze results over time.

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A nanoscale biological coating could prevent battlefield deaths by halting bleeding nearly instantaneously. Developed by engineers at MIT with the assistance of Ferrosan Medical Devices A/S (Soeborg, Denmark), the coating includes thrombin, a protein involved in blood clotting that has been used clinically for decades for topical hemostasis and wound management. The coating also contains tannic acid, a molecule found in tea.

In a recent study, the researchers developed a biological coating consisting of two alternating layers sprayed onto a material, such as a sponge. The coating forms a film containing a high level of functional thrombin. According to the researchers, sponges coated with the material can be stored stably and carried by soldiers or medical personnel to treat the wounded. Similar sponges could also prove useful in civilian hospitals.

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Robotic surgery developer Intuitive Surgical Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA) has received 510(k) clearance to market its EndoWrist One Vessel Sealer. The bipolar electrosurgical sealing and cutting instrument is designed for use with the firm’s da Vinci Si Surgical and a dedicated version of the ERBE VIO 300D electrosurgical generator, sold and supported by Intuitive Surgical, that will only control the Endowrist One vessel sealer instrument. The wristed, disposable instrument is intended for bipolar coagulation and mechanical transection of vessels up to 7 mm in diameter and tissue bundles that fit in the jaws of the instrument. It is not intended for use for tubal sterilization or tubal coagulation for sterilization procedures.

The EndoWrist One Vessel Sealer enables da Vinci Si surgeons to fully control vessel sealing, according to the manufacturer, while providing high surgical precision, control, stability, and 3-D HD visualization.

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A multidisciplinary team of engineers from the University of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz have developed a surgical robot, called Raven 2, for use as an open source surgical robotics research platform. Seven units of the Raven 2 will be made available to researchers at Harvard , Johns Hopkins, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles, while the remaining two systems will remain at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Washington.

The Raven 2 is a surgical robot with 7 degrees of freedom, compact electronics and two wing-like arms which end in tiny gripper claws designed to perform surgery on simulated patients. The robot’s software is compatible with Robot Operating System, an open source robotics coding platform.

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Last week, we announced that the second artificial trachea implant procedure had been performed under the leadership of Paolo Macchiarini, MD, PhD at the Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden). To get some perspective on what this news means for the field of medicine and tissue engineering, Medgadget spoke with Dr. Macchiarini as well as David Green, president of Harvard Bioscience (Holliston, MA), a company that made the bioreactor used to create the tissue-engineered trachea implants.

“The most important thing to me is that we now have evidence that regenerative medicine has promise; we’ve proved that it works in the clinic,” says Macchiarini.

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