Successful treatment of biofilm infections using shock waves combined with antibiotic therapy (vol 5, 17440, 2015)

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/srep17440

Successful treatment of biofilm infections using shock waves combined with antibiotic therapy

Many bacteria secrete a highly hydrated framework of extracellular polymer matrix on suitable substrates and embed within the matrix to form a biofilm. Bacterial biofilms are observed on many medical devices, endocarditis, periodontitis and lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients. Bacteria in biofilm are protected from antibiotics and >1,000 times of the minimum inhibitory concentration may be required to treat biofilm infections. Here, we demonstrated that shock waves could be used to remove Salmonella, Pseudomonas and Staphylococcus biofilms in urinary catheters. The studies were extended to a Pseudomonas chronic pneumonia lung infection and Staphylococcus skin suture infection model in mice. The biofilm infections in mice, treated with shock waves became susceptible to antibiotics, unlike untreated biofilms. Mice exposed to shock waves responded to ciprofloxacin treatment, while ciprofloxacin alone was ineffective in treating the infection. These results demonstrate for the first time that, shock waves, combined with antibiotic treatment can be used to treat biofilm infection on medical devices as well as in situ infections

HealthAgents: distributed multi-agent brain tumor diagnosis and prognosis

We present an agent-based distributed decision support system for the diagnosis and prognosis of brain tumors developed by the HEALTHAGENTS project. HEALTHAGENTS is a European Union funded research project, which aims to enhance the classification of brain tumours using such a decision support system based on intelligent agents to securely connect a network of clinical centres. The HEALTHAGENTS system is implementing novel pattern recognition discrimination methods, in order to analyse in vivo Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) and ex vivo/in vitro High Resolution Magic Angle Spinning Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (HR-MAS) and DNA micro-array data. HEALTHAGENTS intends not only to apply forefront agent technology to the biomedical field, but also develop the HEALTHAGENTS network, a globally distributed information and knowledge repository for brain tumour diagnosis and prognosis