New Way to Look at Tissue Biopsies: Spatial Light Interference Microscopy

Pathologists would gain new tool to diagnose cancer faster and more accurately, based upon stain-free analysis of tissue
Reading tissue biopsies with a new stain-free method could eventually help pathologists achieve faster and less subjective cancer detection. Should this technology prove viable, it would also displace many of the longstanding tissue preparation methodologies used today in the histopathology laboratory.
Credit a research team from the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois (UI) Christie Clinic and at the UI campuses in Urbana and Chicago, with developing this new technology.
They call the technique Spatial Light Interference Microscopy (SLIM). According to a story reported by Futurity.org, the technique uses two beams of light.
New Technology Could Help Pathologists Detect Cancer Earlier
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists stated the new technology offers answers to some of the most elusive questions in contemporary biology: how cell growth is regulated and how cell size distributions are maintained. “SLIM can be so valuable for greatly improving the chances of early detection and treatment of cancer,” declared study leader Gabriel Popescu, Ph.D., Quantitative Light Imaging Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Beckman Institute.
The reason for Popescu’s optimism is SLIM’s capabilities using optical interferometry, or interference patterns, to make accurate measurements of waves at the molecular level. This enables the technique to work with great sensitivity.

Pathology Labs Replace Microscopes with Digital Imaging

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Non-US deployment of Aperio platform with image storage on a Hitachi platform.  400,000 glass slides annually at a rate of 300 TB of storage per year.  Very cool. Look for more adoption overseas this year.  

Microscopes are being replaced with digital imaging in pathology laboratories in the southern part of Sweden.

Traditional microscope glass slides are turned into digital images, which are then analyzed by pathologists directly from the computer screen, instead of using regular microscopes.

The revolution, which has already occurred in radiology, is now taking place in pathology. The contracted delivery not only digitizes the slides but also will completely renew IT support for all workflows of the pathology laboratories in the Skåne region.

Labvantage (Somerset, NJ, USA) will deliver a USD 4 million turnkey solution for digitizing the histopathological workflows in the whole region. The system will be possibly the largest such installation in the world and among the first of its kind in northern Europe. The digital slides will reside in Hitachi’s (Tokyo, Japan) Content Platform, which employs distributed object storage. All of the images will be kept well protected and duplicated across several physical discs. This makes the traditional backing up of data unnecessary.

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Do Doctor's need coach? MUST READ

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ANNALS OF MEDICINE

PERSONAL BEST

Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?

by Atul GawandeOCTOBER 3, 2011

No matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where coaching comes in.

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KEYWORDS

Coaches;

 

Surgeons;

 

Teachers;

Education;

 

Tennis;

 

Atul Gawande;

Robert Osteen

I’ve been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better.

During the first two or three years in practice, your skills seem to improve almost daily. It’s not about hand-eye coördination—you have that down halfway through your residency. As one of my professors once explained, doing surgery is no more physically difficult than writing in cursive. Surgical mastery is about familiarity and judgment. You learn the problems that can occur during a particular procedure or with a particular condition, and you learn how to either prevent or respond to those problems.

Say you’ve got a patient who needs surgery for appendicitis. These days, surgeons will typically do a laparoscopic appendectomy. You slide a small camera—a laparoscope—into the abdomen through a quarter-inch incision near the belly button, insert a long grasper through an incision beneath the waistline, and push a device for stapling and cutting through an incision in the left lower abdomen. Use the grasper to pick up the finger-size appendix, fire the stapler across its base and across the vessels feeding it, drop the severed organ into a plastic bag, and pull it out. Close up, and you’re done. That’s how you like it to go, anyway. But often it doesn’t.

Even before you start, you need to make some judgments. Unusual anatomy, severe obesity, or internal scars from previous abdominal surgery could make it difficult to get the camera in safely; you don’t want to poke it into a loop of intestine. You have to decide which camera-insertion method to use—there’s a range of options—or whether to abandon the high-tech approach and do the operation the traditional way, with a wide-open incision that lets you see everything directly. If you do get your camera and instruments inside, you may have trouble grasping the appendix. Infection turns it into a fat, bloody, inflamed worm that sticks to everything around it—bowel, blood vessels, an ovary, the pelvic sidewall—and to free it you have to choose from a variety of tools and techniques. You can use a long cotton-tipped instrument to try to push the surrounding attachments away. You can use electrocautery, a hook, a pair of scissors, a sharp-tip dissector, a blunt-tip dissector, a right-angle dissector, or a suction device. You can adjust the operating table so that the patient’s head is down and his feet are up, allowing gravity to pull the viscera in the right direction. Or you can just grab whatever part of the appendix is visible and pull really hard.

Once you have the little organ in view, you may find that appendicitis was the wrong diagnosis. It might be a tumor of the appendix, Crohn’s disease, or an ovarian condition that happened to have inflamed the nearby appendix. Then you’d have to decide whether you need additional equipment or personnel—maybe it’s time to enlist another surgeon.

Most path labs unauthorized

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BERHAMPUR: Before undergoing any pathological tests,. Most of the you should check the genuineness of the pathological laboratory pathological laboratories mushrooming in every nook and corner of the state are not operated by trained pathologists, nor do they get valid license from the government to run the laboratory.
"Most of the pathological laboratories are run by non-pathologists, non-technicians and without proper license," said Nimai Charan Parija, president of Indian Association of Pathologists and Microbiologists (IAPM) here, on the sidelines of the Orissa chapter of annual conference of IAMP on Saturday.
He said the IAPM was constantly fighting against the illegal practice in various states of the country and urged upon authorities to crack down on unauthorized laboratories.

Doctors’ poison pill burns our pockets

It’s all well to talk about Bofors and 2G corruption. But what about the cuts taken by doctors who refer patients for tests and scans?  

In these heady days of Anna's triumphs, it is difficult to write about anything but corruption in India, and the subject is so vast, encompassing as it does every aspect of human activity, that the mind cannot think of other subjects on which to write.

Anna Hazare's campaign and the Jan Lokpal Bill have concentrated on corruption among government servants-the term extending from the prime minister to the lowest clerk in a tehsildar's office. This covers a wide swathe of economic and social activity of the people.

Dangerous Chemical: Dihydrogen Monoxide

A student at Eagle Rock Junior High won first prize at the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair, April 26. He was attempting to show how conditioned we have become to alarmists practicing junk science and spreading fear of everything in our environment. In his project he urged people to sign a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical "dihydrogen monoxide."
And for plenty of good reasons, since:

1. it can cause excessive sweating and vomiting
2. it is a major component in acid rain
3. it can cause severe burns in its gaseous state
4. accidental inhalation can kill you
5. it contributes to erosion
6. it decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes
7. it has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients

He asked 50 people if they supported a ban of the chemical.

• Forty-three (43) said yes,
• six (6) were undecided,
• and only one (1) knew that the chemical was water.

The title of his prize winning project was, "How Gullible Are We?" He feels the conclusion is obvious.

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