One problem with medical technology is that it often is good enough to find something troubling but not good enough to tell what it means.
Using various imaging devices, for example, doctors can scan our organs for early signs of cancer, but doing so can cost a lot of money and cause much anxiety. Researchers hope that as technology improves, these problems will diminish.
This topic drew an overflow crowd this month to a session at McCormick Place during the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. Several scientists described how a new generation of magnetic resonance imaging machines may improve diagnostic specificity.
MRI machines use magnetic fields to produce images of soft tissue and also to analyze some aspects of the tissue. Newer machines produce magnetic fields that are four times stronger than most.
The added strength means that tests can be done faster, and the images produced are sharper, but it also provides analytic capabilities that move researchers into a new realm.
Robert Lenkinski, who does research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Harvard University, described work by his group, which focuses upon lesions found in the breasts, lungs and prostate glands.
“The problem we have today is what happens once we find a lesion,” Lenkinski said. “Seventy-five percent of the breast lesions we find are benign. The situation is even worse for lesions of the lung. The National Cancer Institute sponsors screening of smokers who are at high risk. In this population, we find lesions in 25 to 40 percent, but only 2.5 percent are malignant.”
Today, once a lesion is discovered, it is common for physicians to perform a biopsy and remove a portion of the lesion to determine if it contains cancer cells. But this procedure carries some risk, especially if a lung lesion is located near the heart.
Prostate lesions present their own difficulties because sometimes physicians who insert needles into the prostate are unable to locate the lesion to extract a tissue sample.
The goal of Lenkinski’s research is to use MRI not only to spot a lesion, but also to characterize it without resorting to a biopsy. Initial results suggest it is possible to determine a metabolic “fingerprint” for cancer cells. This should enable physicians to rule out most benign lesions and send patients for biopsy only when there is a high probability of cancer.
Such technology may be available within a few years for breast and prostate diagnosis, Lenkinski said, but lung diagnosis improvement probably will take longer.
Good to the bone: Research at Purdue University suggests that designing artificial hips and knees with nano-scale surfaces could extend their useful life.
Artificial hips and knees often become loose, causing great pain to the patient, after about 15 years.
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The smooth surface of conventional titanium alloys used to make many implanted body parts may be a hindrance to the body’s efforts to merge bone with the artificial implant. But making a surface with tiny bumps, each about 100 nanometers across, could solve the problem, the Purdue researchers found.
Whereas only about half of bone cells suspended in a solution with conventional titanium alloy would adhere to the surface, researchers found that 90 percent of bone cells exposed to nano-surfaced titanium alloy adhered to it.
“We believe the bone cells are basically recognizing the rougher nanometer surface” as material similar to what it adheres to in the body, said Thomas Webster, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue.