SilhouetteMobile PDA for
wounds
Photo credit: Aranz Medical
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Wound
camera monitors healing
CHRISTCHURCH, NZ — SilhouetteMobile, a handheld
computer with a customized camera attachment and software,
takes most of the guesswork out of monitoring progress
in wound healing.
The sleek-looking device, a contender
for the New Zealand health ministry's 2007 Health Innovations
Awards, to be announced October, takes high-resolution
3D images of wounds, bringing digital age benefits to
judging tissue damage.
The detailed images, which take
about two minutes to shoot, analyze, and store, provide
an accurate measure of the extent of an injury. Stored
in a patient's electronic record, the snapshots provide
reliable time-lapse feedback on a given course of treatment,
freeing you from basing decisions only on eyeball estimates
of a sore's size.
H5N1 lab-in-a-chip
Photo credit: Institute
of bioengineering and technology |
Avian
flu chip has wings
SINGAPORE — Time's of the essence when it comes
to identifying contagious pathogens. In Singapore, scientists
have developed a diagnostic test which they claim can
be used to identify the deadly H5N1 virus in less than
30 minutes — over 10 times faster than conventional
tests.
Described as a "lab on a chip,"
the palm-sized device manipulates samples using electromagnetic
forces and tiny silica-coated magnetic particles which
are mixed into saliva or stool swabs. The all-in-one
test integrates the workflow of viral RNA isolation,
purification, concentration and detection. The bird
flu test is the product of a Singaporean collaboration
between researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering
and Nanotechnology, Institute of Molecular and Cell
Biology, and Genome Institute of Singapore, which have
developed other widely-used avian flu detection kits
in the past.
Expected to be priced at a hundredth
of the price of other avian flu tests, the chip could
make routine surveillance more accessible in developing
countries, ensuring speedy responses to confirmed H5N1
cases. The chip's developers claim that other similar
tests could be built for SARS, AIDS and hepatitis B.
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