In a recent TED Talk, Tan Le of Emotive Systems demonstrates a wireless headset that can read your brainwaves thus allowing for control of electronic systems. Le highlights a few applications including the ability to control on-screen graphics, smart home features such as closing curtains, and controlling an electric wheelchair.
The headset is relatively simple compared to previous research designs that utilized hairnets completely covered with sensors. As Le describes in her video, the research behind the technology is non-trivial and calibration is necessary for each individual.
In a shift from the usual needle used to deliver the Influenza vaccine, a Nature Medicinepaper shows that researchers from Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a painless patch to do the same thing. This patch is coated with 100 polymer micro-needles (650 microns in length - less than the thickness of a nickel) which dissolve after application to the skin. According to the report:
This new approach incorporates vaccine in a lyophilized form within the structural polymer material of the microneedle, thereby avoiding the need for reconstitution before administration. These polymer microneedles dissolve in the skin within minutes and are safely eliminated by the body, as evidenced by the historical use of PVP as a plasma expander. The use of needles measuring just hundreds of microns in length not only eliminates pain and enables simple delivery through a thin patch, but also inherently targets antigen to the abundant antigen-presenting cells of skin’s epidermis and dermis.
The paper notes that the patch is just as effective at immunizing mice as the standard hypodermic needle. In addition to the benefit of decreased pain associated with vaccination, this delivery method may be safer (because it produces less biohazardous waste) and it may allow for self-administration in the event of a pandemic.
In a special report from the New England Journal of Medicine, a Web-based interactive mapping system called HealthMap is cited as an exemplar of a new generation of public health informatics tools. HealthMap is designed to track H1N1 Influenza:
HealthMap . . . is an example of a new effort in transparent, global, public health surveillance. The HealthMap system combines automated, around-the-clock data collection and processing with expert review and analysis to aggregate reports according to type of disease and geographic location. HealthMap sifts through large volumes of information on events, obtained from a broad range of online sources in multiple languages, to provide a comprehensive view of on-going global disease activity through a freely available Web site.
The site, created by a team at Children’s Hospital Boston, has a number of features including its ability to demonstrate real-time data gathered from the web, to provide a platform for collaborative investigations and to visualize the data geographically for a concerned public.
MDiTV also hopes to premiere live surgeries through partnerships with “founding member hospitals,” and will broadcast medical meetings live, according to Lazzara. Surgeries and medical meetings will be presented in a way similar to how ESPN presents a sporting event, said Lazzara.
As a medical student, I can’t help but feel sympathetic for standardized patients. These trained actors take on the persona of someone with a real medical concern and allow medical students to interview and exam them for a “diagnosis.” So imagine going to your doctor knowing he/she had no idea what they were doing.
I can only think that the feeling is nerve-racking. Yet, the experience is a critical component of training the next horde of physicians before they interact with real patients. Journalist Emily Yoffe describes her experience as a standardized patient for second-year medical students at Georgetown’s Medical School. Her account is quite funny:
Some were shaking so violently when they approached me with their otoscopes-the pointed device for looking in the ear-that I feared an imminent lobotomy. Some were certain about the location of my organs, but were stymied by the mechanics of my hospital gown and drape. And a few were so polished and confident that they could be dropped midseason into Grey’s Anatomy.
The feedback provided from standardized patients this early in a student’s training is important for understanding how to become a better doctor not just in physical exam technique but more importantly in connecting with vulnerable individuals on a personal level.
A new contributor to Scope, Stesha Doku is a second-year Stanford medical student writing about international health, medical technology and education. She is currently doing public health research in Sydney, Australia.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) formed the Transparency Task Force to develop recommendations for making useful and understandable information about FDA activities and decision making more readily available to the public in a timely manner and in a user-friendly format.
In support of the Agency’s Transparency Initiative, CDRH launched this Transparency Web site to provide meaningful and timely information about the products it regulates and the decisions it makes.
A new contributor to Scope, Stesha Doku is a second-year Stanford medical student writing about international health, medical technology and education. She is currently doing public health research in Sydney, Australia.
The American Academy of Neurology Foundation supports an annual film festival competition aimed at awarding films that highlight neurological disorders and the need for more research towards treatments and prevention.
If you haven’t seen it yet, earlier this week Dean Kamen (of Segway fame) showed off the Luke Arm he’s been working on the last few years. The robotic arm is a big leap for prosthetics and is currently in clinical trials. See it in action for yourself.
In an entry on The Huffington Post, Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society, discusses how dogs are helping veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan cope with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after service:
Many have difficulty finding employment, sever important relationships in their lives, and suffer diminished capacity to function in society. They may face their post-war emotional struggles alone, and it may be too much to bear. Mental illness, isolation, and suicide are not uncommon outcomes.
Amid such anguish there is hope. In yet another benefit of the human-animal bond, dogs are now being enlisted to help these veterans reclaim their emotional balance. In an experimental program, the federal government is providing preliminary support to connect some veterans with trained dogs to help them heal.
The current program has shown some promise in both reducing symptoms and reliance on medication. Dogs provided to veterans are psychiatric trained service dogs, some of which have been trained through the Puppies Behind Bars program which also stimulates rehabilitation of prison inmates.
The MIT researchers used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to stimulate the RTPJ of partipicants before and during the process of making a moral judgment on character’s actions. The MIT News Office reports:
In one experiment, volunteers were exposed to TMS for 25 minutes before taking a test in which they read a series of scenarios and made moral judgments of characters’ actions on a scale of one (absolutely forbidden) to seven (absolutely permissible).
In a second experiment, TMS was applied in 500-milisecond bursts at the moment when the subject was asked to make a moral judgment. For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely.
The researchers found that, with the application of TMS, participants relied less on their inferences from the character’s beliefs and intentions (or mental states). In particular, when considering situations in which a character attempts to harm, but does not succeed, researchers found that the study participants considered the attempted harms to be “less morally forbidden” than when TMS was applied to a controlled site in the brain.
A new contributor to Scope, Stesha Doku is a second-year Stanford medical student writing about international health, medical technology and education. She is currently doing public health research in Sydney, Australia.
Women in academic medicine may earn less than men do, even when their academic accomplishments are comparable, according to a study being published in the April issue of Academic Medicine.
Researchers at the Mongan Institute for Health Policy looked at 3,080 randomly selected of men and women doing research in the life sciences with NIH funding at the top 50 academic medical centers. They found that women earned annually anywhere from $6,000 to $13,000 less than similarly qualified men, controlling for productivity and other personal factors.
The study looked at a number of indicators including leadership positions, publications, and hours worked in their professional activities.
Women working in the life sciences should not assume they are being paid as much as equally qualified men, and academic institutions should look hard at their compensation and advancement policies and their cultures. In the end, I suspect major systemic changes will be needed if we ever hope to achieve the ideal of equal pay for equal work in academic medicine.
A new contributor to Scope, Stesha Doku is a second-year Stanford medical student writing about international health, medical technology and education. She is currently doing public health research in Sydney, Australia.
A recent New York Timesarticle highlighted advances in applying stem cell technology to treat skin diseases. These techniques may offer a more advanced method to treating a rare skin disease known as Epidermolysis bullosa (EB for short). EB is a serious and often fatal disease, caused by a missing collagen gene needed to hold skin together. Patients with EB are highly susceptible to skin injury and often wrap their bodies in gauze for protection.
Alfred Lane, MD, a pediatric dermatologist at Stanford, is leading an effort to use stem cells created by “reprogramming” ordinary skin cells to grow treatment grafts. This approach is less controversial than using embryonic stem cells and it would allow researchers to insert the missing gene to grow healthy grafts.
