Surgical Device Development

The pre-development phase takes an idea to a concept with a business case for developing the device. Key elements include defining user needs, generating different concepts and their respective regulatory pathway, intellectual protection strategy, reimbursement model and overall commercialization strategy. The development phase is an iterative process that converts the concept into a product that is tested and evaluated through the verification and validation process, and ready for regu­latory submission. Design Transfer is a set of procedures that are required to ensure that the device’s design is correctly translated into production specifications and performing a market preference evaluation prior to a full scale product launch. Following product launch, the product enters the post-market activities phase, in which operations are scaled up to reach sales targets, the product is maintained and improved if possible, and strategies for product refresh, product extensions, seeking new markets

Biomedical text annotation and summarization

Advancements in the biomedical community are largely documented and published in text format in scientific forums such as conferences and journals. To address the scalability of utilizing the large volume of text-based information generated by continuing advances in the biomedical field, we propose a two-part text summarization system to reduce the volume of text which must be read by biomedical professionals. The contributions of the text summarization system are a) it utilizes biomedical concepts rather than terms to find the main points of a text, b) it uses two new concept-based algorithms to find important areas of a text for extracting sentences to form a summary, and c) it is supported by a new semantic annotation sub-system, which identifies biomedical concepts found in biomedical text documents. The semantic annotation subsystem uses a novel multiple-filter system architecture for online matching of concepts defined by a biomedical metathesaurus. The goal of semantic annotation is to show that online text-to-concept mapping can be performed without a significant loss of precision as compared to current offline systems. An evaluation shows the text summarization algorithms using concepts outperform existing summarization systems, and the semantic annotation system performs twenty times faster than a state-of-the-art system with no significant loss of precision

Modern Breast Cancer Detection: A Technological Review

Breast cancer is a serious threat worldwide and is the number two killer of women in the United States. The key to successful management is screening and early detection. What follows is a description of the state of the art in screening and detection for breast cancer as well as a discussion of new and emerging technologies. This paper aims to serve as a starting point for those who are not acquainted with this growing field

Evaluating the role of force feedback for biomanipulation tasks

Paper presented at the IEEE Virtual Reality, Haptics Symposium and Symposium on 3D User Interface, Alexandria, VA.Conventional cell manipulation techniques do not have the ability to provide force feedback to an operator. Poor control of cell injection force is one of the primary reasons for low success rates in cell injection and transgenesis in particular. Therefore, there exists a need to incorporate force feedback into a cell injection system. We have developed an automated cell injection system, which has the capability of measuring forces in the range of μN. We tested our system with 40 human subjects to evaluate the role of force feedback in cell injection task. Our experimental results indicate that the subjects were able to feel the cell injection force and confirmed our research hypothesis that the use of combined vision and force feedback leads to higher success rate in cell injection task compared to using vision feedback alone

Approaches to text mining for clinical medical records

The 21st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2006, Technical tracks on Computer Applications in Health Care (CAHC 2006), Dijon, France, April 23 -27, 2006. Retrieved 6/21/2006 from http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/hhan/SAC2006_CAHC.pdf.Clinical medical records contain a wealth of information, largely in free-text form. Means to extract structured information from free-text records is an important research endeavor. In this paper, we describe a MEDical Information Extraction (MedIE) system that extracts and mines a variety of patient information with breast complaints from free-text clinical records. MedIE is a part of medical text mining project being conducted in Drexel University. Three approaches are proposed to solve different IE tasks and very good performance (precision and recall) was achieved. A graph-based approach which uses the parsing result of link-grammar parser was invented for relation extraction; high accuracy was achieved. A simple but efficient ontology-based approach was adopted to extract medical terms of interest. Finally, an NLP-based feature extraction method coupled with an ID3-based decision tree was used to perform text classification

Converting semi-structured clinical medical records into information and knowledge

Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2005, pp. 1647765.Clinical medical records contain a wealth of information, largely in free-textual form. Thus, means to extract structured information from free-text records becomes an important research endeavor. In this paper, we propose and implement an information extraction system that extracts three types of information — numeric values, medical terms and categorical value — from semi-structured patient records. Three approaches are proposed to solve the problems posed by each of the three types of values, respectively, and very good performance (precision and recall) is achieved. A novel link-grammar based approach was invented to associate feature and number in a sentence, and extremely high accuracy was achieved. A simple but efficient approach, using POS-based pattern and domain ontology, was adopted to extract medical terms of interest. Finally, an NLPbased feature extraction method coupled with an ID3- based decision tree is used to classify and extract categorical cases. This preliminary approach to categorical fields has, so far, proven to be quite effective

Lung metastasis 21 years after initial diagnosis of osteosarcoma: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>To the best of our knowledge, this case report describes the longest disease-free interval between primary diagnosis and metastatic recurrence of an osteosarcoma.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>A 35-year-old Caucasian American man presented with asymptomatic lung metastases 21 years after being diagnosed and treated for lower extremity osteosarcoma. He underwent curative lung resection, but 2 years thereafter developed metastatic disease in the scapula and tibia and, after resection and chemotherapy, is in remission 1 year later.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This case highlights the importance of long follow-up periods and continued surveillance of osteosarcoma patients after initial curative treatment.</p

Soft tissue elastic modulus measurement and tumor detection using piezoelectric fingers

2005 MRS Fall Meeting, 898, pp. 1-6.We have investigated probing breast tumor in a lumpectomy sample using a newly developed piezoelectric finger (PEF). PEF is a piezoelectric cantilever that consists of a top driving piezoelectric lead zirconate titanate (PZT) layer and a bottom sensing PZT layer sandwiched to a middle stainless steel layer. A PEF can both apply a force and detect the corresponding displacement in one single device by simple electrical means. Applying an electric field to the driving PZT layer causes the PEF to bend which in turn causes a measurable induced voltage across the sensing PZT layer that is proportional to the deflection of the PEF’s tip. Earlier studies have demonstrated that with the appropriate tip geometry, the PEF could accurately measure the elastic and shear moduli of a soft material. It could also differentiate and locate hard inclusions embedded in a soft matrix by the contrast of elastic moduli. In this study, we applied the PEF to probe a lumpectomy sample and located the tumor inside the sample using the spatial contrast of elastic moduli

Improving the efficacy of cellular therapy by magnetic cell targeting

Poster presented at Biomedical Technology Showcase 2006, Philadelphia, PA. Retrieved 18 Aug 2006 from http://www.biomed.drexel.edu/new04/Content/Biomed_Tech_Showcase/Poster_Presentations/Barbee.pdf.The hot topic of stem cell research has raised hopes for new treatments for a breadth of ailments. As the expectations continue to mount, most related engineering research has been focused around new tools for isolation and propagation of cell lines, with inadequate attention to effective delivery strategies. Invasive or systemic injections come with increased risk and poor efficiency, often wasting a vast majority of the total cellular dosage. We present a method for magnetic targeting of cells in the body with the use of a two-source method of magnetic drug delivery proposed previously in the literature