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Diseases May Be Identifiable By Laser

February 19, 2008 By MedNews Leave a Comment

Testing a person’s breath with laser light can identify molecules which may serve as markers for diseases like asthma or cancer, according to a team of scientists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder. Their findings are published in the latest issue of the Optical Society of America’s open-access journal Optics Express.

Cavity-enhanced frequency comb spectroscopy, as the technique is called, may one day permit doctors to screen patients for certain diseases by sampling their breath. "This technique can give a broad picture of many different molecules in the breath all at once," says Jun Ye, who led the research. He is a fellow of JILA, a fellow of NIST and a professor adjoint at CU-Boulder’s Department of Physics.

Ye’s JILA colleague John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch of Germany’s Max-Planck Institute (they shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with Roy J. Glauber for their invention), developed optical frequency comb spectroscopy in the 1990’s. Optical comb spectroscopy is powerful enough to sort through all the molecules in human breath, Ye says, but it is also sensitive enough to find those rarest molecules that may be markers of specific diseases.

Every time we breathe in, we inhale a complex mixture of gasses—mostly nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor, but also traces of other gasses, such as carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. Each time we exhale, we blow out a slightly different mixture with less oxygen, more carbon dioxide, and a rich collection of more than a thousand types of other molecules—most of which are present only in trace amounts.

Source: Optics Express, Vol. 16, Issue 4, February 18, 2008.

Filed Under: General Health Tagged With: technology

New “Fractional Laser” Reduces Wrinkles, Acne Scarring, Removes Tattoos

February 15, 2008 By MedNews Leave a Comment

Plastic surgeons at UT Southwestern Medical Center are using a new kind of laser that penetrates deeper into the skin to reduce wrinkles, treat pigmentation differences, and tighten surface structures.

The FDA approved the laser for only two U.S. Centers to test for general patient use, of which UT Southwestern was one. Testing has been completed by UT plastic surgeons who are now using the new carbon dioxide-based fractional laser. It combines minute focused columns of laser-induced injury with heat disposition, which reduces skin damage and aids quicker recovery tme.

"Fractional lasers are like aerating your lawn, where you have a bunch of holes in your lawn, but you have normal lawn in between. This allows for more rapid healing because intact, normal skin bridges the gap between the laser-induced injured skin," said Dr. Jeffrey Kenkel, vice chairman of plastic surgery whose research involves the effects of lasers on tissue.

Dr. Kenkel, director of the Clinical Center for Cosmetic Laser Treatment and chief of plastic surgery at the Veterans Administration Medical Center at Dallas, said the technology potentially could be one of the last decade’s biggest advancements in the laser world.

"What’s appealing about carbon dioxide lasers is that not only can you get surface and deeper skin changes, but you get heat that’s deposited into the skin resulting in improvement in wrinkles and skin tightening," said Dr. Kenkel. "We evaluate the laser on tissue that has either been removed from patients or that we plan on removing so we can determine what effect it’s going to have before we start treating patients clinically."

This latest laser was made by Lumenis Device Technologies. It has a larg arm and two heads an can be used on a wide range of conitions—wrinkle removal, acne scarring, alleviating dark pigmentation, and other conditions. UT Southwestern has more than 200 lasers available, and is a world leader in offering patients laser treatment options.

The new laser treatments are office-based procedures done on an out-patient basis, but may require some local or regional anesthetic, with recovery time related to the type of procedure. In most instances recovery is between three and five days. Depending on what’s required, procedure costs can range from $500 to $3,000 and are usually considered cosmetic.

"There are a lot of patients who would rather not have surgery and who are looking for things to improve their appearance without surgical down time," Dr. Kenkel said. "In addition, there’s a whole group of younger patients who are looking for improvement who are not necessarily in need of surgery but perhaps would benefit from some of the lesser invasive procedures that we have to offer."

Americans spent more than $12 billion last year on cosmetic procedures, involving 11.5 million surgical and nonsurgical procedures, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Nonsurgical procedures, which include laser treatments, accounted for about 83 percent of those procedures.

Source: UT Southwestern Medical Center

Filed Under: Dermatology Tagged With: acne, dermatology, technology

Using the Internet in Medical Practice: Web 2.0 and Medicine

August 8, 2007 By MedNews Leave a Comment

Some 80% of American adults use the Internet for health searches, according to a research report by Pew Internet.

Increasingly, physicians and other medical professionals are finding various uses, especially with the advent of more recent online services and tools, such as Social Networks, Blogging, Second Life, Wikis, Medical Search Engines and Video and Podcasts.

Writiing in Science Roll, Bertalan Meskó provides Ten Tips for Using Web 2.0 in Medicine, with descriptions of various tools and forums, and links to resources.

Meskó is a medical student at the University of Debrecen, Hungary who plans to become a clinical geneticist specialized in personalized genomics—he believes it’s the future of medicine. In a recent post about Medicine and Web 2.0, Meskó writes:

“I’m pretty sure that web 2.0, the new generation of web services, will (and already is playing) play an important role in the future of medicine. These web tools, expert-based community sites, medical blogs and wikis can ease the work of physicians, scientists, medical students or medical librarians.

We believe that the new generation of web services will change the way medicine is practiced and healthcare is delivered. “

There’s a good overview description of various resources available, along with links.

For the full article, read: Ten Tips on How to Use Web 2.0 in Medicine.

Other references: Pew Internet – Online Health Search 2006 (PDF)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: technology

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