Digital Pathology Blog

Brain activation stimulated by listening to the B-52s

Believe it or Don't - Researchers at Stanford have identified a specific pattern of brain activation stiumlated by listening to the B 52s:

http://rocknrollfriends.blogspot.com/2008/02/hurry-up-and-bring-your-cat-scan-money.html

Here are some clips from their new album:

http://www.myspace.com/theb52s

Now go scan thyself ...

Online network delivers specialty-focused emails to subscribing clinicians

The Wall Street Journal (3/25, D7, Rubenstein) reports that "a nonprofit group called the iHealth Alliance is launching an online network that will email alerts to doctors who sign up" about specialty-focused "significant drug-label changes, warnings, and recalls," as well as public health emergency and bioterrorism alerts. After receiving an initial email, clinicians "will get updates by going to a website called the Health Care Notification Network, which will archive alerts for a year," and "provide suggested language that doctors can forward to their patients, explaining the alerts in lay terms." Additionally, those who use the site "will be able to hit buttons that will let them send feedback to the" Food and Drug Administration "or the manufacturers about patients' reactions to drugs." Notably, pharmaceuticals "will pay to use the new system, which will be free for doctors, and won't include any drug-company marketing materials."

Olympus OnSite Truck

I had an opportunity yesterday to take a tour and view the Nanozoomer at a recent health fair at my insitution on the Olympus Onsite delivery system.  I might be the last person in this space to see this but it is worth checking out when it comes to a site near you!  A link to a video tour is available here as well as details.  This is a traveling booth on a 18 wheeler that showcases Olympus's microscopes, surgical products and diagnostic systems as well as areas for financial and healthcare services and consumer camera and recorder products.  Olympus is brought directly to you!

Here is a previous press release from Olympus with more specifics.

My personal thanks to the sales and marketing vendor associates for the personalized tour and demonstration.

Near-infrared light may help detect microscopic signs of Alzheimer's disease in brain tissue

        The UPI (3/18) reports that "[n]ear-infrared light may help detect microscopic signs of Alzheimer's disease in brain tissue," according to a study published in the journal Optics Letters. Researchers from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Research "showed that as the microscopic plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease accumulate, the optical properties of the brain change and can be detected."

        Data indicate 18 percent of baby boomers may develop dementia USA Today (3/18, 6D, Fackelmann) reports that approximately "14 million, or roughly 18 percent, of the USA's 79 million baby boomers can expect to develop Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia in their lifetime," according to the report, 2008 Alzheimer's Disease Facts and Figures, which also "states that one out of eight boomers will be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the most common type of dementia, at some point." Should no cure for Alzheimer's be found, the U.S. "will be faced with a half-million new cases of Alzheimer's in 2010, and nearly a million a year by the middle of the century." As baby boomers ago, "[t]he coming Alzheimer's epidemic will, if left unchecked, put a huge strain on the healthcare system, including Medicare," experts warn.

Researcher Issued Patent for Virtual Telemicroscope

Newswise — After nearly ten years of research and development, scientists at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and Peking University in Beijing were awarded a United States patent for their virtual telemicroscope. This patented software permits off-site pathologists to diagnose cancer or other diseases in patients living in remote locations around the world.

Virginia M. Anderson, MD, associate professor of pathology at SUNY Downstate, and Jiang Gu, MD, PhD, dean and chairman of pathology at Peking University, developed the virtual microscope system, the only one of its kind capable of emailing electronic slides. Using their patent, the Chinese company Motic – a global leader in microscope manufacturing -- created a microscope with a robotic stage that scans whole slides at various magnifications and then creates compressed images that can be emailed all over the world.

In China, where the device is being tested as a diagnosis instrument, 600 hospitals do not have an on-site pathologist. The system was developed with that fact in mind.

“Enormous voids in pathology services exist. Virtual slides are definitely going to improve diagnostic accuracy and healthcare,” says Dr. Anderson.

The Motic telepathology system utilizes a computer and microscope, which enables interactive communication on a user network. A robot scans the whole tissue sample on the microscope. Subsequent images corresponding to the selected area of the specimen are linked at higher magnifications. The patented software turns an ordinary computer into a virtual microscope. High magnification images are compressed and linked to the low power scanned glass slide that is stored as a virtual slide file. Images can then be emailed and analyzed by pathologists at remote locations. Once received, Internet independent images can be stored and viewed as part of the electronic medical record or medical student teaching file.

“The virtual telemicroscope is designed the way pathologists think and work,” Dr. Anderson says, adding, “A pathologist would never scan an entire histopathologic section at high power. This is inefficient and unnecessary. Slides prepared by an experienced pathologist will focus on important areas to make a diagnosis.”

Clinical trials showed that Motic’s virtual telemicroscope is “as good as or better than the competition.” The system is also teaching-friendly, allowing professors to manipulate existing digital slides and create new slides for students to study.

The next generations of medical students and pathologists are being taught through interactive technology. The virtual telemicroscope will save time and money, improve medical education, and provide insight into the pathogenesis of disease. Microscopes will be used to prepare whole slide images for analysis on a big screen or laptop computer.

The SUNY Downstate system produces the only virtual slides that can be emailed around the world. Moreover, it is also the least expensive, Internet independent solution for expert consultation. Clinical trials published in the journal, Human Pathology (February 2008), confirm the diagnostic accuracy of virtual slides as compared to traditional methods.

A Camera with 12,616 Lenses

STANFORD, Calif., March 19, 2008 -- A digital camera is being developed with 12,616 microlenses -- each in effect a tiny camera -- that can take photos in a kind of super 3-D for potential use in facial recognition, biological imaging, and 3-D printing, among other applications.

Electronics researchers at Stanford University, led by electrical engineering professor Abbas El Gamal, are developing the digital camera around their multiaperture image sensor. Traditional digital cameras have one main lens, known as the objective lens, and focus an image directly on the camera's image sensor, producing a flat, 2-D photo. The objective lens of the multiaperture camera instead focuses its image about 40-µm above the image sensor arrays. As a result, any point in the photo is captured by at least four of the chip's tiny cameras, producing overlapping views, each from a slightly different perspective, just as your left eye sees things differently than the right.

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The researchers have shrunk the pixels on the sensor to 0.7 microns (millionths of a meter), several times smaller than pixels in standard digital cameras, and have grouped them in arrays of 256 pixels each. They're now preparing to place a tiny lens atop each array.

With these thousands of tiny lenses, the camera can provide an electronic "depth map" containing the distance from the camera to every object in the picture, resulting in a super 3-D image with every object in focus.

"It's like having a lot of cameras on a single chip," said Keith Fife, a graduate student working with El Gamal and another electrical engineering professor, H.-S. Philip Wong. In fact, if their prototype 3-MP chip had all its microlenses in place, they would add up to 12,616 "cameras."

Point such a camera at someone's face, and it would, in addition to taking a photo, precisely record the distances to the subject's eyes, nose, ears, chin, etc. One obvious potential use of the technology: facial recognition for security purposes. Other possible applications include biological imaging, 3-D printing, creation of 3-D objects or people to inhabit virtual worlds, or 3-D modeling of buildings.

The technology is expected to produce a photo in which almost everything, near or far, is in focus. But it would be possible to selectively defocus parts of the photo after the fact, using editing software on a computer.

"You can choose to do things with that image that you weren't able to do with the regular 2-D image," Fife said. "You can say, 'I want to see only the objects at this distance,' and suddenly they'll appear for you. And you can wipe away everything else."

Knowing the exact distance to an object might give robots better spatial vision than humans and allow them to perform delicate tasks now beyond their abilities. "People are coming up with many things they might do with this," Fife said.

The three researchers published a paper on their work in the February edition of the IEEE ISSCC Digest of Technical Papers.

Their multiaperture camera would look and feel like an ordinary camera, or even a smaller cell phone camera. The cell phone aspect is important, Fife said, given that "the majority of the cameras in the world are now on phones."

The sensor could be deployed naked, with no objective lens at all. By placing the sensor very close to an object, each microlens would take its own photo without the need for an objective lens. It has been suggested that a very small probe could be placed against the brain of a laboratory mouse, for example, to detect the location of neural activity.

Other researchers are headed toward similar depth-map goals from different approaches. Some use intelligent software to inspect ordinary 2-D photos for the edges, shadows or focus differences that might infer the distances of objects. Others have tried cameras with multiple lenses, or prisms mounted in front of a single camera lens. One approach employs lasers and another attempts to stitch together photos taken from different angles, while yet another involves video shot from a moving camera.

But El Gamal, Fife and Wong said they believe their multiaperture sensor has some key advantages. It's small and doesn't require lasers, bulky camera gear, multiple photos or complex calibration. And it has excellent color quality. Each of the 256 pixels in a specific array detects the same color. In an ordinary digital camera, red pixels may be arranged next to green pixels, leading to undesirable "crosstalk" between the pixels that degrade color.

The sensor also can take advantage of smaller pixels in a way that an ordinary digital camera cannot, El Gamal said, because camera lenses are nearing the optical limit of the smallest spot they can resolve. Using a pixel smaller than that spot will not produce a better photo. But with the multiaperture sensor, smaller pixels produce even more depth information, he said.

The technology also may aid the quest for the huge photos possible with a gigapixel camera -- that's 140 times as many pixels as today's typical 7-MP cameras. The first benefit of the technology is straightforward: Smaller pixels mean more pixels can be crowded onto the chip. The second benefit involves chip architecture. With a billion pixels on one chip, some of them are sure to go bad, leaving dead spots, El Gamal said. But the overlapping views provided by the multiaperture sensor provide backups when pixels fail.

The researchers are now working out the manufacturing details of fabricating the micro-optics onto a camera chip. The finished product may cost less than existing digital cameras, the researchers said, because the quality of a camera's main lens will no longer be of paramount importance.

"We believe that you can reduce the complexity of the main lens by shifting the complexity to the semiconductor," Fife said.

For more information, visit: http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/elgamal/multiap.html

Funding for Online Health Applications

The “Microsoft HealthVault be Well Fund” is going to help academic and research health organizations create innovative online health applications for patients. These applications should use shared health data and connected home health devices to improve positive health outcomes for patients.

An RFP has been issued to open new and innovative avenues for research and explore the improvements needed in health management that involves sharing between people, families, caregivers, doctors, and facilities. Eligible organizations include colleges and universities, and non-profit health institutions. Private sector organizations may partner with these institutions.

Proposals need to have the potential to advance the state-of-the-art in one or more areas of study and demonstrate the potential for expansion into a large scale program. The areas of study include primary and secondary prevention applications, acute care applications, juvenile disease management, women’s health management, and community and social health applications.

The total amount available under this RFP is $3,000,000. Microsoft Health Solutions
Group anticipates making approximately 20 awards averaging $250,000, with a maximum of $500,000 for any single award. The RFP closes on May 9, 2008 and the awards will be announced on July 1, 2008.

For more information, go to http://healthvault.com/fund.

Surgeons remove, reinsert multiple organs in patient with cancerous tumor

The CBS Evening News (3/24, story 10, 2:00, Smith) reported on "a ground breaking 15-hour surgery" performed by Dr. Tomoaki Kato and a team at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center. The physicians operated on a cancer patient's "abdomen like the hood of a car and took out the entire engine, her stomach, pancreas, liver, spleen, large and small intestines and kidneys." Once removed, "[t]he organs were chilled while surgeons detangled the tumor from" the woman's aorta. After the tumor was gone, "the organs, connected to Gor-Tex blood vessels, went back in."

According to the Miami Herald (3/24, Tasker), the organs were placed "in a steel pan cooled to four degrees Celsius, and kept...there for nearly two hours while" the team took out "the now-reachable tumor." The surgery "is believed to be the first of its kind."

Discussing the logistics of the surgery, Reuters (3/25, Brown) quotes Dr. Kato as saying, "There's nothing really simple here." Kato continues, "I don't want to say acrobatic but it's kind of, in a way," because "[i]t's a very tricky operation." HealthDay (3/24, Reinberg) and WebMD (3/24, Mann) also covered the story.

Researchers use MRI to non-invasively characterize tumors

Science Daily (3/24) reported that researchers at the University of California-San Diego's School of Medicine "have shown that Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technology has the potential to non-invasively characterize tumors and determine which of them may be responsive to specific forms of treatment, based on their specific molecular properties." To do this, Michael Kuo, M.D., and colleagues, "analyzed more than 2,000 genes that had previously been shown to have altered expression in Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) tumors." After "mapp[ing] the correlations between gene expression and MRI features," the researchers "identified characteristic imaging features associated with overall survival of patients with GBM, the most common and lethal type of primary brain tumor." They "discovered five distinct MRI features that were significantly linked with particular gene expression patterns."

The AFP (3/25) adds that, while the "study was focused on mapping the molecular features of the most common and deadly primary brain tumor," it could also "be used to better identify other tumor types." The study can be found in the Mar. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Mayo Clinic Facebook logs on

This will go in for Medicine 2.0 but interesting concept ---

By Jeff Hansel, Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN 

In the old days, patients came to Rochester from far and wide as the reputation of Mayo Clinic grew by word of mouth.

Clinic officials want to continue that positive-word-of-mouth grapevine, but with a modern-day twist, says Lee Aase, Mayo's manager for syndication and social media.

To make that happen, Mayo has started using an Internet tool more often associated with teenagers and 20-somethings -- Facebook.

"It'll be authentic. It'll be people sharing their own experiences," Aase said Wednesday afternoon.

Mayo's page on the social networking website is relatively new, with its current version going online just a few weeks ago and no advertising campaign yet.

But as people stumble across the page within the Facebook non-profits category, they've begun to get interested -- just like they used to get interested when someone told a story after visiting Rochester.

The Mayo Facebook page includes links to Mayo podcasts, Web sites, health information and history.

Designers especially want to encourage patients who've already received treatment at Mayo to tell their stories online.

No estimates have been made for expected page visits.

"We really don't know what to expect," Aase said. "But we also know that this is a service in Facebook that now has 65 million regular users."

The site is growing by thousands of new worldwide users daily.

That represents a gold mine, both for Facebook and for Mayo's hospitals and clinics. Facebook etiquette frowns on removal of reader comments, Aase said, although Mayo will remove any egregious comments.

For now, Mayo doesn't expect to add staff to handle the page. But that's a possibility if enough people begin visiting.

In Aase's view, the more patients who share their stories, the better. He expects Facebook to one day be as necessary a communication tool as a telephone.

"Facebook is one of the social-networking sites where increasing numbers of people are going," he said. "It's like having a white pages ad or yellow pages ad."

Web links

• Mayo Clinic Facebook