Platform For Medical Applications Research Articles

Therapeutic applications of sustainable new chitosan derivatives and its nanocomposites: Fabrication and characterization

Chitosan (CS) is a biologically active biopolymer used in different medical applications due to its biodegradability, biocompatibility, and nontoxicity. Nanotechnology is an exciting and quick developing field in medical applications. Nanoparticles have shown great potential in the treatment of cancer and inflammation. In the present work modification of chitosan and its (Ag, Au, or ZnO) nanocomposites by N-aminophthalimide (NAP) occurred through the reaction with epichlorohydrin (ECH) as a crosslinker in the presence or absence of glutaraldehyde (GA) under different reaction conditions using microwave irradiation to give modified chitosan derivatives CS-2, CS-6, and their nanocomposites. Modified chitosan derivatives were characterized using different tools. CS-2 and CS-6 derivatives displayed enhancement of thermal stability and crystallinity compared to chitosan. Additionally, CS-2, CS-6, and their nanocomposites exhibited improvements in antitumor activity against HeLa cancer cells and enzymatic inhibitory against trypsin and α-chymotrypsin enzymes compared to chitosan. However, CS-2 revealed the highest cell growth inhibition% toward HeLa cells (89.02 ± 1.46 %) and the enzymatic inhibitory toward α-chymotrypsin enzyme (17.13 ± 1.59 %). Furthermore, CS-Au-2 showed the highest enzymatic inhibitory against trypsin enzyme (28.14 ± 1.76 %). These results suggested that the new chitosan derivatives CS-2, CS-6, and their nanocomposites could be a platform for medical applications against HeLa cells, trypsin, and α-chymotrypsin enzymes.

Monodisperse Gold Nanoparticles: A Review on Synthesis and Their Application in Modern Medicine.

Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are becoming increasingly popular as drug carriers due to their unique properties such as size tenability, multivalency, low toxicity and biocompatibility. AuNPs have physical features that distinguish them from bulk materials, small molecules and other nanoscale particles. Their unique combination of characteristics is just now being fully realized in various biomedical applications. In this review, we focus on the research accomplishments and new opportunities in this field, and we describe the rising developments in the use of monodisperse AuNPs for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. This study addresses the key principles and the most recent published data, focusing on monodisperse AuNP synthesis, surface modifications, and future theranostic applications. Moving forward, we also consider the possible development of functionalized monodisperse AuNPs for theranostic applications based on these efforts. We anticipate that as research advances, flexible AuNPs will become a crucial platform for medical applications.

Challenges of an additive manufacturing service platform for medical applications

Additive Manufacturing (AM) as a service is already offered to consumers, as well as to business customers in industry. Various service platforms exist. AM as a service for the healthcare domain is a rather new concept. In this paper we provide an overview of challenges and special requirements of providing AM as a service for medical applications such as implants, anatomic models, and medical tools. We discuss these aspects, based on a practical case of an AM lab operated in a hospital and present the design of such a platform and its specific challenges in the healthcare domain.

Interfacing human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons with designed nanowire arrays as a future platform for medical applications.

Nanostructured substrates such as nanowire arrays form a powerful tool for building next-generation medical devices. So far, human pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons-a revolutionary tool for studying physiological function and modeling neurodegenerative diseases-have not been applied to such innovative substrates, due to the highly demanding nature of stem cell quality control and directed differentiation procedures to generate specialized cell types. Our study closes this gap, by presenting electrophysiologically mature human pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons on a set of nanowires in different patterns and growth densities after only four weeks of maturation-thereof 14 to 16 days on the nanowire arrays. While cell viability is maintained on all nanowire substrates, the settling regime of the cells can be controlled and tuned by the nanowire density from a fakir-like state to a complete nanowire wrapping state. Especially, full electrophysiological integrity of the neurons independent of the settling regime has been revealed by patch clamp experiments showing characteristic action potentials. Based on these results, our protocol has the potential to open new pathways in stem cell research and regenerative medicine utilizing human stem cell-derived neurons on tailor-made nanostructured substrates.

Improved dielectric, conductivity and magnetic properties of erbium doped α-Fe2O3 nanoparticles

This work demonstrates the synthesis of erbium (Er3+) ion doped ⍺-Fe2O3 nanoparticles through sol–gel method. The synthesized nanoparticles were thoroughly characterized by various analytical techniques such as XRD, FESEM and EDS, which confirmed that the prepared nanoparticles belong to hexagonal crystal structure with R-3c space group and are well crystalline and highly dense. The as synthesized nanoparticles were studied for dielectric, conductivity and magnetic properties. From dielectric studies, an increase in dielectric constant was observed with the increase in temperature and decrease in frequency. With Er3+ ion doping, a considerable increase in dielectric constant was observed for all doping concentrations. The temperature dependent dc conductivity follows Motts law thereby confirming variable range hopping mechanism in these systems. The room temperature magnetization was observed to increase significantly by incorporating Er3+ ions into ⍺-Fe2O3 lattice. In addition, an exciting result of this study was that the Er3+ ion doped ⍺-Fe2O3 nanoparticles saturate at low applied field of around 10 kOe compared to pure ⍺-Fe2O3 system which does not saturate up to the maximum applied field of 20 kOe. Attaining high saturation magnetization at low applied magnetic field in Er3+ ion doped ⍺-Fe2O3 system could provide a novel platform for medical applications.

Abstract No. 506 Holographic visualization for performance of percutaneous ablation of solid liver tumors: from development, to bench testing, to first-in-human evaluation

Currently, 2D screens are used for image guidance of percutaneous ablation of solid tumors, an inherently 3D task. This can lead to inaccurate ablation probe placement which can cause inadequate treatment and subsequent tumor recurrence, among other complications. The purpose of our project was to develop and evaluate true 3D holographic guidance for PTA (“3D HPA”) from bench to first-in-human clinical evaluation, and analyze its potential to increase ablation accuracy and usability. We developed a 3D HPA prototype with our augmented-reality (AR) platform for medical applications. Holograms of the patient’s anatomy and of mini-GPS-tracked ablation probes were registered and projected directly onto the operative site with HoloLens (Microsoft, WA, USA), an untethered, head-mounted display for AR. Probe placement accuracy was first assessed on the bench by targeting 1-cm-diameter spherical simulated tumors in an anthropomorphic phantom. Next, early in vivo feasibility was evaluated in an IRB-approved clinical study while adhering to current standard of care. HoloLens video captures were recorded and reviewed from this first-in-human evaluation to analyze accuracy. During bench testing using 3D HPA, the probe tip was placed accurately within 9/9 target spheres located at depths ranging from 3 to 15 cm within the phantom. Our first attempt in vivo was also successful, as defined by placement of the ablation probe within the tumor in the location targeted by the clinician. Initial testing with our 3D HPA prototype demonstrated accurate placement of ablation probes in both phantom and in vivo settings, supporting its potential to improve accuracy of percutaneous tumor ablation, which could lead to better-quality patient care as well as potential benefits for the global health care system. Further evaluation of 3D HPA and development of applications for use of holographic visualization in other types of procedures is ongoing.

A Body Sensor Network Simulation Platform for Medical Applications

Body Sensor Networks (BSN) is an important technology in providing ubiquitous healthcare services. These sensors are capable of supplying medical professionals with data collected from a patient outside the hospital environment. Remotely acquired information has enormous application potential and can assist medical professionals to provide fast and accurate assistance to injured people at accidents sites, minimizing the risk of further complications by reducing delays in the diagnosis process. Despite the great benefits of such applications, there is a gap in the state-of-art techniques that allow the creation and testing of such high-level and critical applications. This paper presents a body sensor network simulation environment as a response to that need, providing a tool that plays a key role in assisting the development of critical healthcare applications through an emulated healthcare-specific hardware, which can be used to test applications in a controlled environment, considering the demands of the medical field.

Enabling Safe Interoperation by Medical Device Virtual Integration

The safe compositionality and integration of heterogeneous components represents a major challenge in medical cyber-physical systems. The paradigm of medical application platforms allows the virtual integration of heterogeneous devices with various communication infrastructures, but does not fully address the safety properties of the overall system. This paper presents a medical device virtual integration framework for composing medical devices and control applications into an interoperable system without violating the safety properties.

Improvement of JXTA-Overlay P2P Platform

JXTA-Overlay is a middleware built on top of the JXTA specification, which defines a set of protocols that standardize how different devices may communicate and collaborate among them. JXTA-Overlay provides a set of basic functionalities, primitives, intended to be as complete as possible to satisfy the needs of most JXTA-based applications. In this paper, the authors improve the reliability of our JXTA-Overlay P2P platform by implementing a new fuzzy-based Peer Reliability (PR) system. In the system, the authors considered three input parameters: Local Score (LS), Security (S) and Number of Interactions (NI). They evaluate JXTA-Overlay platform for medical applications and reliability. The experimental results show that by using JXTA-Overlay is possible to decide the situation of the patients. The simulation results have shown that the proposed system has a good performance and can choose reliable peers to connect in JXTA-Overlay platform.

Radiated EMC immunity investigation of common recognition identification platform for medical applications

An innovative e-healthcare platform named common recognition and identification platform (CRIP) was developed and tested as part of the CareStore project. CareStore and CRIP aims at delivering accurate and safe disease management by minimising human operator errors in hospitals and care facilities. To support this, the CRIP platform features fingerprint biometrics and near field communication (NFC) for user identification; and Bluetooth communication support for a range of telemedicine medical devices adhering to the IEEE 11073 standard. The aim of this study was to evaluate the electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) immunity of the CRIP platform in order to validate it for medical application use. The first prototype of CRIP was demonstrated to operate as expected by showing the user identification function feasibility, both via NFC and biometric, and by detection of Bluetooth devices via radio frequency (RF) scanning. The NFC module works in the 13.56 MHz band and the Bluetooth module work in the 2.4 GHz band, according to the IEEE 802.15.1 standard. The standard test qualification of the CRIP was performed based on the radiated EMC immunity with respect to the EN 61000-4-3 standard. The immunity tests were conducted under industrial EMC compliance with electric field aggression, with levels up to 10 V/m in both horizontal and vertical polarisations when the test antenna and the CRIP were placed at a distance of 3 m. It was found that the CRIP device complies with the European electromagnetic (EM) radiation immunity requirements.

Foundational Security Principles for Medical Application Platforms (Extended Abstract).

We describe a preliminary set of security requirements for safe and secure next-generation medical systems, consisting of dynamically composable units, tied together through a real-time safety-critical middleware. We note that this requirement set is not the same for individual (stand-alone) devices or for electronic health record systems, and we must take care to define system-level requirements rather than security goals for components. The requirements themselves build on each other such that it is difficult or impossible to eliminate any one of the requirements and still achieve high-level security goals.

A Low-Power Embedded Communication Platform for Medical Applications

Article A Low-Power Embedded Communication Platform for Medical Applications was published on September 6, 2012 in the journal Biomedical Engineering / Biomedizinische Technik (volume 57, issue SI-1-Track-N).

Complex window query support for monitoring streaming data in wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) combined with various body sensors and personal electronic devices are emerging as a new platform for medical applications. This paper proposes a real-time monitoring system with complex window query support for enabling advanced monitoring on streaming data that is produced by the body sensors and transmitted through the WBAN. The main techniques developed are the caching for multi-source data stream support, complex range expression processing with interval skip lists, and historic data processing for sliding window condition monitoring support. The condition monitoring query language and efficient processing mechanisms to support the complex monitoring are presented. Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides a wider spectrum of monitoring functions as well as enhancing the scalability and efficiency of the monitoring.

An optical scan/statistical package for clinical data management in C-L psychiatry

This paper explores aspects of the need for clinical database management systems that permit ongoing service management, measurement of the quality and appropriateness of care, databased administration of consultation-liaison (C-L) services, teaching/educational observations, and research. It describes an OPTICAL SCAN databased management system that permits flexible form generation, desktop publishing, and linking of observations in multiple files. This enhanced MICRO-CARES software system—Medical Application Platform (MAP)—permits direct transfer of the data to ASCII and SAS formal for mainframe manipulation of the clinical information. The director of a C-L service may now develop his or her own forms, incorporate structured instruments, or develop “branch chains” of essential data to add to the core data set without the effort and expense to reprint forms or consult with commercial vendors.