Biomedical Engineering News

Lung cancer is a very life threatening cancer and one of the most difficult cancers to treat because it has a tendency to spread to other parts of the body in its early stage. Furthermore, those patients whose medical condition is complicated by presence of other diseases like acute cardiac disease besides being affected by lung cancer are unsuitable for invasive surgery required to treat lung cancer. Approximately 1.3 million people die every year due to lung cancer worldwide. In 90% patients affected with lung cancer, the cancer originates from the epithelial cells lining the lung airways known as bronchi and bronchioles.

Conventional radiation therapy treatment for lung cancers required 25 to 30 sessions of radio therapy where each session lasted for about 30 minutes.

The next generation Gated RapidArc technology introduced by Varian Medical Systems, Inc allows the doctor to detect the exact location of cancer in the lung with highest precision, while the patient is breathing. The Gated RapidArc technology uses 4-Dimensional Gated Stereotactic Body Radiosurgery to deliver full dose of radiation therapy in just 1 to 3 sessions of ten minutes each. This helps to reduce the effective treatment to just one week as compared to six weeks treatment time with conventional radiation therapy treatment.

The Gated RapidArc technology uses advanced motion management capability to ‘gate’ the radiation beam, turning it on or off in response to tumor motion during treatment. This helps to eliminate the cancerous lung tissue with high precision without causing any damage to surrounding healthy lung tissue.

The Gated RapidArc technology is superior to conventional radiation therapy and traditional invasive surgical treatments because it is completely non-invasive and leaves no scars from surgical incisions on body.

Source: Varian Medical Systems, Inc.

Chronic back pain is a condition where pain persists in the lower back for more than three months, interfering with routine daily work of the patient.

Chronic back pain is second most common cause of missed work in America affecting people of age between 30 years to 50 years, the first being headache.

Chronic back pain could result from a failed back surgery or from injury or trauma to the back. It could also result from degenerative conditions like arthritis, disc disease, diabetes or osteoporosis. Sometimes the cause of chronic back pain remains unidentified and the condition worsens progressively.

The Implantable Pulse Generator is a newly developed micro-electronic device powered by a battery which can be used to control & cure chronic back pain. This device can be implanted into the epidural space, next to the spinal cord in human body. Very small pulses of electricity are generated from this device to block or stimulate nerve signals. When the nerve causing the pain is blocked or stimulated (depending on the condition), pain stops and is replaced with a more mild sensation known as paresthesia.

Source: Morgan Technical Ceramics

Professor Israel Gannot at Tel Aviv University, located in Israel, is developing a new method to find and destroy cancerous tumors. This new method uses heat to kill the cancerous cells which would result in less damage to surrounding cells and tissues and fewer side effects for the patient.

Having specific ‘biomarkers’ attached to tumors, a special mixture of nano-particles and antibodies are injected into the blood stream. It finds and binds to the tumor and then the mixture just washes out of the body and has minimal side effects. “Once the nano-particles bind to the tumor, we excite them with an external magnetic field, and they begin to heat very specifically and locally” Gannot explains. After deploying the magnetic field, the temperature rises on the targeted area, and the heat elevation results in killing the tumors.

This new treatment has been effective on epithelial cancers, about 85% of cancers, which could be developed in any area of the body.

One other benefit of this method is the speed of the treatment. It is said to be administered in an outpatient setting and would not exceed more than six hours. This new research will be published in Nanomedicine journal.

In Vitro Fertilization is a technique to treat infertility where egg is fertilized with sperm outside the human body in a static culture dish until it develops into a suitable quality embryo which is then implanted into the uterus, resulting in pregnancy. In Vitro Fertilization is a significant advancement as an assisted reproductive technology to treat those couples, in which the fallopian tubes of the female are blocked or damaged or in which the male produces low sperm counts.

The success rate of In Vitro Fertilization varies widely and depends a lot on the quality of preimplantation embryos produced by in vitro manipulation as compared to embryos produced in vivo.

Researchers at University of Michigan Medical Center have found that when preimplantation embryos are allowed to grow outside the human body in dynamic culture systems which simulate the in vivo biomechanical environment, it resulted in the development of better quality embryos.

These researchers have developed a new device called Dynamic Microfunnel Embryo Culture System which enhances the In Vitro Fertilization treatment outcomes by providing a better simulation of the fluid-mechanism and biochemical stimulation embryos experience in vivo from ciliary currents and oviductal contractions. This resulted in 22 percent higher success rate of In Vitro Fertilization treatment in mice. This study could pave the way to increase embryo production efficiency for higher successful In Vitro Fertilization treatment rates in humans.

Source:  Journal Human Reproduction, 2010

Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a disease that affects the retinal blood vessels which are not developed fully in babies which are born prematurely. Babies which are born earlier than 32rd week of pregnancy and which are born with birth weight less than 1.5 kilograms are at high risk to develop retinopathy of prematurity. Retinopathy of prematurity can affect the premature babies in varying degrees of severity.  In mild cases, the premature babies may show no visual defects. In severely affected cases, it may lead to retinal detachment and total blindness.  It is estimated that about 500 to 700 babies become blind as a result of being affected by retinopathy of prematurity each year in United States alone, on an average basis.

Traditional imaging devices like medical ultra-sonography, magnetic resonance imaging, and confocal microscopy are not suitable for  screening the infant eye to detect retinopathy of prematurity. This is because medical ultrasonography and magnetic resonance imaging generate tissue scan images with poor resolution. Confocal microscopy lacks millimeter penetration depth and provides scanned images for only superficial layers of eye tissue. Ophthalmoscope or camera also has limitations because it can only generate two dimensional images of superficial or anterior layers of eye tissue.

Duke University Medical Center has now introduced a new hand held biomedical engineering device called spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD OCT) to screen for retinopathy of prematurity in premature baby’s eye.  This SD OCT device uses narrow beam of broadband light sources which can penetrate the deeper layers of tissue to generate a three dimensional scanned image of posterior section of the infant eye. Using a hand held probe, this SD OCT device can click cross-sectional images of retina by laterally combining a series of these axial depth scans. This SD OCT device can snap images of retina 40 times faster than previous versions of OCT.

This reduces the time spent on diagnosis & increases the precision in detecting the occurrence & severity of retinopathy of prematurity in premature baby. This also significantly reduces the discomfort to hospital staff and parents, as the premature baby does not have to be moved out of the incubator to click these images by SD OCT device. The scan images generated by SD OCT device could significantly influence the decision-making by doctors during treatment.

Source: Duke University Eye Center

There is seemingly no end to the amount of effort that people will exert on video games. Whether the digital environment rewards players with points, coins, or simply bragging rights, gamers will devote significant energy to achieving tasks—even mindless tasks—when presented in video game form. Recently, computer scientists and biochemists harnessed this collective energy and applied it to a scientific goal. The goal of the game called FoldIt: predict the structure of a protein.

Proteins are polymers (long chains) of amino acids that fold themselves into staggeringly complex ways. The way that a protein folds itself is determined by various physical and chemical properties. Each property is predictable by itself, but when you combine thousands of interacting properties in a single protein, the final structure becomes exponentially harder to predict. However, knowing the precise structure of a protein allows researchers to design molecules that selectively target that protein. Thus a drug can increase or decrease the protein’s biological activity without affecting other proteins and causing side effects.

In the August 5, 2010 installment of the journal Nature, researchers created a game that challenges users in an online environment to try to determine the structure of protein. Users from all over the world could log on to the game and compete or collaborate to make the best protein structure. The rules of the game closely follow the chemical and physical properties that determine protein folding in the first place. While gamers did not need to know about the sulfur crosslinks formed by cysteine, it was made clear to players which orientations were more favorable than others.

It turns out that players of FoldIt performed at least as well as already existing macromolecular prediction software. Human players were able to create potential conformations and orientations in ways that software could not, since software only follows a set of predefined rules. Human gamers bring creativity and strategy to the process and, when opened to a global online audience, effectively become human supercomputer.