Mobile Medical Applications – FDA Guidelines
September 8, 2011
The use of mobile medical apps on tablets and smartphones is becoming more and more common in healthcare. Therefore the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has included medical imaging applications in a new draft guidance document. It is not yet final. Comments and suggestions may be submitted to the FDA until October.
An MR scan in 5 minutes?
September 1, 2011
Imagine you could do an MR scanner in 5 minutes and get all the image types that you need.
SyntheticMR offers a product called SyMRI that does just that: “On the MR scanner a special sequence is introduced that results in the measurement of the absolute MR parameters.Based on these parameters T1- and T2-weighted image can be generated without rescanning. As each tissue has its own unique combination of parameters, the anatomy can automatically be segmented into various tissue components”.
The quantification scan is a multi-slice, multi-echo, multi-saturation delay sequence that is able to retrieve T1 and T2 relaxation, proton density and the B1 field in one scan.
Whether this is the future of MRI, only time and clinical studies will tell, but it looks promising.
AnatOnMe: Augmented reality applied to Healthcare
June 21, 2011
Microsoft Research has come up with a virtual tool for physiotherapy. The idea behind it is to motivate people recovering from injuries to do their exercises. AnatOnMe is a device that projects images of the bones muscles and ligaments inside the body onto the patient’s own skin. This is a novel implementation of augmented reality as the augmented world is projected on the patient. An image of the underlying bone structure, muscle tissue, tendons, or nerves is projected onto the skin, giving patients a better understanding of the injury, and of what they need to do to help the healing process.
The device consists of two parts: the first one contains a projector, an ordinary digital camera, and an infrared camera. The second contains a laser pointer and the control buttons. The system is not meant to be very accurate, and the image of the internal injury is not precisely map onto the patient’s exterior, the therapist simply points the projector and lines it up by eye. The images displayed are not actually taken from scans of the patients but come from stock graphical images used to show one of six different types of injury. However, it works pretty well to educate patients and help them better understand their injuries.
