Backreaction: The Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy Center (HIT)—the first medical heavy-ion machine in Europe—has opened.
Close to the GSI facility near Darmstadt, the Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy Center is a dedicated heavy-ion accelerator for deployment in radiotherapy to treat tumors.
Physicist Stefan Scherer briefly takes a look at this new facility and the physics behind it.
latimes.com: Three federal agencies—the Food and Drug Administration, the Defense Department and the National Eye Institute—announced last week that they are launching a three-year effort to gauge how many, and which, patients suffer troubling symptoms after undergoing the vision correction procedure called Lasik.
Physics Today: Batteries can power anything from small sensors to large systems. University of Missouri researchers are developing a nuclear energy source that is smaller, lighter and more efficient.
"To provide enough power, we need certain methods with high energy density," said Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU. The radioisotope battery can provide power density that is six orders of magnitude higher than chemical batteries.
Kwon and his research team have been working on building a small nuclear battery, currently the size and thickness of a penny, intended to power various micro/nanoelectromechanical systems. Although nuclear batteries can pose concerns, they are safe are already powering a variety of devices, such as pace-makers, space satellites and underwater systems.
Kwon's innovation is not only in the battery's size, but also in its semiconductor. Kwons battery uses a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor.
The critical part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure of the solid semiconductor, said Kwon. By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem.
Kwon has been collaborating with J. David Robertson, chemistry professor and associate director of the MU Research Reactor, and is working to build and test the battery at the facility.
In the future, they hope to increase the battery's power, shrink its size and try with various other materials. Kwon said that the battery could be thinner than the thickness of human hair.
NYTimes.com: Two cases involving CT scans are under scrutiny in California—one involving a large, well-known Los Angeles hospital, the other a tiny hospital in the northern part of the state—underscoring the risks that powerful CT scans pose when used incorrectly.
Raven Knickerbocker, then an X-ray technologist at Mad River Community Hospital in Arcata, activated a CT scan 151 times on the same area of the head of 2 ½-year-old Jacoby Roth, investigators concluded.
A week ago, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles disclosed that it had mistakenly administered up to eight times the normal radiation dose to 206 possible stroke victims over an 18-month period during a procedure intended to get clearer images of the brain.
Although CT scans are useful in determining internal injuries, there are major risks associated to patients because of the intensity of the X-rays used in the device, either through human error, or through too frequent exposure to X-rays.
In 2000-2001, CT scans constituted 7% of all radiologic examinations, but contributed 47% of the total collective dose from medical X-ray examinations.
BBC News: Scientists in Italy think they may have come up with a new way to scan for cancer of the stomach or colon.
The 'spider pill,' which is fitted with a camera, is swallowed by the patient and once within the colon or intestine the legs are opened and the device crawls along the intestine tract, taking pictures as it goes.
The Economist: Dialysis is an unpleasant process that involves being hooked up to a huge machine—often at a hospital—at least three times a week, in order to have your blood cleansed of waste that would normally be voided, via the kidneys, as urine.
Victor Gura, of the University of California, Los Angeles, hopes to make this process more pleasant with an invention that is now undergoing clinical trials. By going back to basics, he has come up with a completely new sort of dialyser—one you can wear.
At the heart of the machine is a lightweight pump. The pump drives blood from a patient through a hollow fiber filter as well as water containing some minerals. The water is constantly purified by circulating through chemicals that capture the blood's impurities. The blood is then pumped back to the patient. The filter needs to be replaced about once a week and the chemicals once a day.
In clinical trials reported in the December 15, 2007 issue of the medical journal Lancet, five men and three women with end-stage kidney failure successfully dialyzed themselves with Gura's prototype device for up to eight hours.
Related Links
A wearable artificial kidney for patients on the go UCLA news
Some related publications
A wearable haemodialysis device for patients with end-stage renal failure: a pilot study The Lancet
IEEE Spectrum: The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.
But why stop there?
In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger's character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field--virtual captions that enhance the cyborg's scan of a scene. In Rainbows End by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes.
"These visions might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach," says Babak A. Parviz.
"In fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle. These lenses don't give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we've powered wirelessly with RF. What we've done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology."
CNET News: New research being developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, could reduce the size of proton accelerator machines from that of a football field to that of a traditional X-ray machine.
The smaller size and cost could increase the availability of proton therapy treatments.
Related Link
Electromagnetic and Thermal Simulations for the Switch Region of a Compact Proton Accelerator
2009 AIP Industrial Physics Forum: Developments from CERN could make CT scanners even better at detecting early cancer cells or other disease indicators.
The particle physics research laboratory's work to create photon counters that can count ten million photons per second—up by a factor of one hundred from previous generation counters—have been integrated into CT systems and had their first trial run with patients. There are more developments that will have to take place before the photon-counters can fullfill their full potential, but early work presented at the recent AAPM meeting looks promising.
While CERN made the progress in photon counter technology, it has been representatives from industry who put them together with CT scanners. At the AIP and AAPM meeting, Reuven Levinson, a Technology Development Leader at GE Healthcare in the CT Engineering group in Haifa, Israel, announced the first use of a photon counting CT system on human patients. The CT's X-ray detector counts the individual photons and measures their energy. Levinson and his team built the photon counting CT system and had it installed last year at the Rabin Medical Center in Tel Aviv, Israel.
2009 AIP Industrial Physics Forum: It took scientists more than twenty years after the first DNA sequencing technology was discovered to sequence the entire human genome; yet our own cells complete this task every time our bodies produces a daughter cell.
So to achieve the goal of real time DNA sequencing, Pacific Biosciences had the idea to spy on Mother Nature as she goes to work copying DNA. Now, the company's commercial device planned to be on the market in 2010, promises to be 20,000 times faster than current second generation technology, with turn around time of about ten minutes rather than ten days.
Chief Technology Officer Steve Turner says in four to five years, new technologies promise to rocket this technology forward even further, making it will possible to sequence an entire human genome in fifteen minutes, on a chip that costs less than 100 dollars
2009 AIP Industrial Physics Forum: Thermal therapy is being used to kill cancer cells in tumors that other methods fail to eliminate, but there is the risk of overheating healthy cells, or not heating the tumor cells enough.
A new idea for improving thermal therapy was recently published in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences and presented at the AAPM session "Frontiers in Medical Physics," by Leo Xuanfeng Ding from Wake Forest University. Using multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCN's) Ding and his collaborators hope to make guided laser cancer removal safer and more effective.
The treatment injects cancer tumors with MWCN's, and uses a guided near infrared laser to heat them up and deliver a fatal temperature rise to the cancer cells. The laser pulse is low energy (3 W/cm2) and fast (30 seconds per dose). The team uses Magnetic Resonance Temperature Imaging, MRTI, to identify the tumor and then to monitor the tumor's temperature as well as the temperature of the surrounding tissue. Trials with mice showed a significant rise in the temperature of the cancer cells injected with the MWCN's, compared to without. And, the tumors were far less likely to come back.
Physics Today: A new $120 million proton therapy center opened in Oklahoma City two weeks ago. It is only the sixth proton treatment center in the US and will treat approximately 1500 patients a year.
The 18,300 m2 facility is a joint project between ProCure Treatment Centers, Inc, a four-year-old start-up company; Radiation Medicine Associates, one of the state's leading radiation oncology practices; and INTEGRIS Health, the state's largest Oklahoma-owned, not-for-profit healthcare corporation, which will offer ancillary care to patients that need it.
ProCure is currently building a US network of proton therapy centers, the second of which will be in Chicago, followed by locations in New Jersey, Detroit and South Florida.
Proton therapy is attractive to physicians because for some types of cancers, the higher doses of radiation can be used to control and manage cancer while significantly reducing damage to healthy tissue and vital organs that occur with more traditional radiation treatment.
The Oklahoma center was built in 27 months and makes use of a number of new innovations, such as the design of the treatment room, and the uses of robotic patient positioning systems to bring the cost of treatment down by a significant margin. The protons are created through use of a 220-ton cyclotron that is 5.4-meters in diameter and 2.4 meters high (see above. Photo credit: ProCure Treatment Centers).
"Right now, there are only about 6,000 treatment slots available in the United States for a quarter of a million cancer patients who are candidates for proton therapy," said Procure's CEO Hadley Ford.
Ford acknowledged that energy executive and philanthropist Aubrey K. McClendon, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy Corporation, personally provided the initial $70 million funding for ProCure. "ProCure's vision to make proton therapy more accessible to cancer patients caught my attention three years ago," says McClendon. "The company has done an exceptional job developing and constructing this facility since that time."
"Oklahoma City's proton center is the realization of what was not much more than a dream four years ago," said Procure's founder, physicist John Cameron (left) at the opening ceremony.
Cameron survived a bout of prostate cancer through proton therapy four years ago. "Many are talking about building proton centers; we're actually doing it," he says. "These are very exciting times for us and for patients with cancer."
"The nature of the proton therapy—a daily course of treatment that can last for up to eight weeks—argues for more centers in many more communities," said W.C. Goad, medical director of the new center. "In every center in the country, half or more of the patients treated come from out of state."
Related Physics Today articles
Accelerators shrink to meet growing demand for proton therapy March 2009
Weighing Proton Therapy's Clinical Readiness and Costs June 2003
Nature News: The worldwide shortage of medical isotopes is about to get much worse this week, as the High Flux Reactor in Petten, the Netherlands, closes for a month-long maintenance inspection.
It joins the National Research Universal reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, Canada, which has been closed since 15 May because of a heavy-water leak and is unlikely to restart before late 2009, according to Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, the government-sponsored body that runs the facility.
Related News Picks
Europe's isotope shortage will continue into 2009
Isotope shortage could delay cancer treatments
Canada pulls plug on costly medical reactor plan
Science News: Undergoing a virtual colonoscopy might be just the ticket for people at high risk of colorectal cancer who need screening every few years, a new study finds. By spotting 85 percent of polyps, computed tomography scans offer a way to detect the precancerous growths in a way that is less invasive than a conventional colonoscopy, a European team of researchers reports in the 17 June Journal of the American Medical Association.
Science: Pacemakers and bionic ears (cochlear implants) were the first medical bionic devices to be used successfully in humans.
On the horizon there is the prospect of a neural prosthesis capable of operating prosthetic limbs, a bionic eye, as well as other devices for the restoration of body function.
These developments are crucially dependent on successfully connecting the device to cellular tissue. The development of organic polymer conductors is contributing to achieving that success.
Related Physics Today articles
Sound Research Aids the Deaf April 2006
Cochlear Implants: Fundamentals and Applications November 2004
Nature: Optical imaging routinely uses multicoloured contrast agents ranging from traditional chemical dyes and fluorophores to specially engineered quantum dots. In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), contrast agents have also proved extremely useful, but their effects are largely indistinguishable from one another, leading to essentially monochrome contrast based on increased or decreased signal strength. Gary Zabow Stephen Dodd, John Moreland & Alan Koretsky are bringing 'colour' to MRI. They have developed an approach to produce MRI contrast agents with characteristic spectral signals, based on the control of mechanical structures. Different versions of these probes can be used simultaneously, and are distinguishable by the geometry-dependent spectral 'colour' of their signals.
Related article
Micro-engineered local field control for high-sensitivity multispectral MRI (Nature 453, 1058-1063)
