Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,814

A feel good story for this Tuesday at work to brighten up your day. Hope it brings a smile to everyone.

Combined, they took 77 years to make and cover an area 28 acres in size, slightly larger than Parliament Hill. They’re beautiful, comforting and hopeful, but at times tinged with sorrow.

This week, Betty Giffin will knock on the front door of a home in Ottawa. She’ll have with her a handmade quilt to give to the woman who lives there. The woman has cancer, as does everyone who receives one of the quilts from Giffin’s organization.

This particular quilt, however, marks a symbolic milestone: it is the 50,000th that Victoria’s Quilts Canada, which Giffin founded in 1999, has delivered.

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Using Google Glass, Augmedix has developed a platform for doctors to collect, update and recall patient and other medical data in real time, technology website TechCrunch reported on Tuesday.

Google Glass is no longer available for consumers but its enterprise business continues to rise especially in the health care sector.

“When you are with doctors without Glass, they are charting and clicking on computers for a lot of the time and not focusing on their patients,” Ian Shakil, CEO of Augmedix was quoted as saying.

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Cool

Shipments of augmented reality hardware, which combine real-world and virtual images in the user’s field of view, are forecast by market research firm IDC to ramp up over the next few years. Unlike virtual reality hardware, which tends to be more geared toward gaming, AR hardware is particularly suited for enterprise use, such as architecture, equipment repair and maintenance,

Product design and medical procedures, to name a few. IDC predicted that VR hardware will take off first, but AR will catch up, with combined devices markets seeing hardware shipments exceeding.

110 million units in 2020.

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New project underway to find answers.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science has announced major updates to its online resources available at “brain-map.org” brain-map.org, including a new resource on Aging, Dementia and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in collaboration with UW Medicine researchers at the University of Washington, and Group Health. The resource is the first of its kind to collect and share a wide variety of data modalities on a large sample of aged brains, complete with mental health histories and clinical diagnoses.

“The power of this resource is its ability to look across such a large number of brains, as well as a large number of data types,” says Ed Lein, Ph.D., Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “The resource combines traditional neuropathology with modern ‘omics’ approaches to enable researchers to understand the process of aging, look for molecular signatures of disease and identify hallmarks of brain injury.”

The study samples come from the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study, a longitudinal research effort led by Dr. Eric B. Larson and Dr. Paul K. Crane of the Group Health Research Institute and the University of Washington to collect data on thousands of aging adults, including detailed information on their health histories and cognitive abilities. UW Medicine led efforts to collect post-mortem samples from 107 brains aged 79 to 102, with tissue collected from the parietal cortex, temporal cortex, hippocampus and cortical white matter.

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Hyderabad: Infections, haemorrhage, swelling and head injuries are some of the prime reasons for brain surgery but experts say taking the patient under the knife is the last option because of the complexities of the procedure which could lead to disability or death.

Senior doctors said despite advancements in technology, dealing with brain surgeries requires much expertise and continues to be a challenging area.

Senior neurosurgeon Dr Radha Krishna said, “Brain surgeries are complex and the protocol is to first opt for medicines. Nowadays due to diagnostic technologies, even the smallest of lesions or tumours are picked up but it is still important to treat them with medicines.”

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A team of researchers has found a key player in brain tumour formation that may lead to new therapies for a deadly and incurable cancer.

The study published in Nature Neuroscience is the first to show that a protein called OSMR (Oncostatin M Receptor) is required for glioblastoma tumours to form.

Glioblastoma is one of the most deadly cancers, resistant to radiation, chemotherapy and difficult to remove with surgery.

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This makes me a little nervous because pathways are very fragile and just the smallest change can result is some very bad/ even devastating results in other areas of the brain/ body.

Alzheimer’s remains one of the costliest yet most mysterious conditions in the United States, where an estimated 5.1 million Americans are living with the incurable, progressive disease. But researchers at The Rockefeller University have found that manipulating a protein pathway linked with Alzheimer’s helped improve memory impairment in mice— a finding that offers hope for new treatment in humans. Memory loss is the hallmark symptom of the disease.

Scientists with the Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation at The Rockefeller University used a complex set of imaging technologies and experiments to identify an early trafficking protein pathway (COPI) that affects amyloid precursor protein (APP), which precedes the formation of amyloid plaques. Previous research on Alzheimer’s have targeted this plaque, but scientists haven’t successfully identified a way to halt its progression. There is currently no cure or effective treatment for the disease.

Alzheimer’s Disease Mortality by State | HealthGrove.

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Nice

The consumer version of Google Glass smart wearable probably won’t be coming to the market anytime soon, but it seems like the project is far from dead. Namely, one of the startups which came to being after Google originally revealed its hi-tech headset several years ago is now raising new capital in order to bring Google’s optical head-mounted display into more hospitals and other health care facilities. The company in question is Augmedix, one of the ten official “Google Glass for Work” partners. Its main activity is developing software for wearable devices utilized in the medical industry, i.e. co-developing inventions which should make doctors’ lives easier. As Augmedix’s CEO Ian Shakil puts it, the doctors are “engaging with patients in front of them” while his company’s inventions are taking care of the “burdensome work in the background”.

Augmedix managed to raise $17 million of strategic investment capital from five institutions: TriHealth Inc., Sutter Health, Catholic Health Initiatives, Dignity Health, and a fifth, yet unnamed entity. This is the second round of funding the Silicon Valley company managed to secure in just over a year after raising $16 million in 2015. In total, the groups which financed Augmedix’s endeavors represent more than 100,000 health care providers. Naturally, the company can’t yet aim to deliver 100,000 of smart wearables designed for the medical industry, but it’s slowly getting there. Specifically, it’s currently providing equipment and services to hundreds of physicians and surgeons and is hoping to do the same with “thousands” more by 2017. No concrete figures have been provided by Augmedix, though the startup did confirm that it’s currently achieving a “multi-million dollar revenue” on a yearly basis.

What does this all mean for Google Glass? Well, despite the plans for the consumer version of the headset being momentarily dropped by Google, the Work program designed to deliver the said piece of hardware to various industries around the world is still going strong, and Augmedix is one of Google’s key partners in this business endeavor. Google Glass 2.0, officially called Project Aura is currently in development for enterprise applications and it seems like it has a very bright future in the medical industry as Augmedix claims its internal study concluded that close to 100 percent of patients are completely fine with their doctors using augmented reality (AR) headsets. In addition to that, it’s worth noting that Glass is the dominant platform Augmedix sells its services on, so it makes sense that this latest round of funding will see it end up in more heath care facilities in the very near future.

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