MIT engineers develop stickers that can see inside the body
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
Recent-ish advancements in tech here have made it possible to continuously measure the amount of exhaled CO2 from a patient's breath, transmit EKGs wirelessly for review by a physician in a hospital, and automatically cycle a blood pressure cuff at any interval we want. All in a patient's living room with equipment carried in one hand. In the very near future these devices will widely incorporate video laryngoscopy using their screens to assist in endotracheal intubations. Video laryngoscopes are already everywhere in the field, but they use their own screen/tablet and require extra work to get recordings out of for documentation purposes.
Ultrasound (the traditional kind - nothing like this article's stickers) is already on board some ambulances. Mostly used for locating deeper veins on people that are otherwise tough/impossible to get IV access on, checking for pneumothorax, or verifying death by confirming there's no heart wall movement.
It's not out of the realm of possibility for the cardiac monitors to gobble up the ultrasound functionality next, and incorporate that into the EKG lead stickers.
Is that something you can use for verifying death? It was my impression that people can still be revived in that state (not easily, but…). Is this just popular misconceptions speaking?
Yes, via the American Heart Association:
> Conclusion: Resuscitation efforts to achieve ROSC, contributing to neurologically intact survival, are needed for at least 38.5 minutes in patients with witnessed OHCA.
OHCA: Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/circ.128.suppl_2...
“In a lot of hospitals, esp in developing countries, the heart rate is still taken as the default indicator for life.”
That’s just nonsense on multiple levels. A person in Vfib or pulseless electrical activity has a “heart rate” but they are inevitably going to die without intervention - they are just as dead as someone with asystole. So nowhere in the world is a heart rate an indicator for life - that isn’t a cultural issue that’s a basic physiology one.
A lack of heart rate is not a necessary nor sufficient indication of death!
The medical indications for basic and advanced cardiac life support are clearly understood throughout the world at this point.
Cultural attitudes towards CPR vary - some of that has to do with education as well. It’s a complicated subject, but Hacker News comments don’t seem to be the most fruitful place to have that discussion.
Reducing CPR to “clinging to life at all costs” is not coming from an informed point of view. CPR performed on a 25 year old otherwise healthy trauma victim and a 95 year old with heart failure are not comparable.
None of these things mentioned require any recent tech advances. This could literally be done in the 80s.
It’s more a testament to how slow meaningful progress has been made in healthcare tech for economic, political and scientific reasons - the non cynical aspect is that for a lot of the cost involved the benefits in outcomes are not necessarily there.
That magic is the cheap and ubiquitous GSM wireless network which is something that wasn't possible in the 80s.
I agree that we should have cheaper innovations in medicine, that we're held back by entrenched interests, and that we could have had cheaper elecommuncation network access a decade or so ago, but some of this simply wasn't possible in the time frame that you're talking about.
It would be amazing to be able to easily ultrasound the womb at any time. I get so anxious in the first months of pregnancy since I cant yet feel kicks to make sure the babys still okay. But if I could continuously check… well, it’d either squash my anxiety entirely car or amplify it to the extreme! Either way, it’d be a game changer.
My son was IVF so we already have images of him most parents would never see (e.g. blast stage), but having a long term ultrasound time lapse of those 9 months of my son would be pretty amazing.
While ultrasound is not ionizing radiation it does cause tissue heating. 24/7 ultrasound is a huge increase from our current practice and seems medically unnecessary beyond being “cool”.
Its pretty baffling to me why we don't do ultrasounds a lot more than we currently do them. Recently went down the rabbit hole of childhood cancers and there are so many that can be detected and treated earlier if ultrasounds were a standard practice at every check up.
The rationale for not doing it seems to be just cost , and its likely you dont have cancer. But if you do , I would sure like to know early!
There are a lot of things you can see that will take you down a rabbit hole of further investigations and turn out to be nothing.
We perform fetal ultrasonography which excludes most of the relevant deadly cardiac conditions.
It is well established in medicine that improved/early detection does not equal improved patient outcomes and can actually result in patient harm.
Is there a specific time of detection that is well established as improving patient outcomes?
Because just like undertesting kills people, overtesting kills people.
And because medical dollars are limited, and even in a perfect world, they should be spent towards the highest ROI.
Also, as mentioned above, the ROI of overtesting can well be negative.
Probably the societal ROI is better for spending more of its healthcare money on something else anyway.
More relevantly, people who are paying for their own care can choose how to address any issues discovered by testing. If you're on a trip deciding where to go and someone tells you not to look at part of the map because it is a dangerous area, does it make sense to blindly believe them or to look at it, do further investigation and then decide whether to travel there?
So testing more can actually result in worse health outcomes than limited testing.
An expecting parent is very excited by seeing the ultrasound of their unborn child. Maybe they wear a patch for a few hours to get more imaging, but I don't think they're going to do 24/7 for months at the risk of harming the baby.
I'd also like to do frequent, early screenings for things like cancers. I'd like imaging cheap enough to where I'm scanned at every physical.
This would seem like like something that might warrant a doctors visit, though I understand that’s easier to say when there is zero financial implication to doing so
It's not emergent (I assume, since we're talking about it, it's unclear if it's as serious as a fracture or not, I assume not massively painful) so I'm going to have to go to a GP, and then unless they think definitely not wait for an x-ray appointment, during which time it's probably sorted itself out and we'll find out either it wasn't a fracture or or how well it healed.
Depending where it is there may be little they could do for you anyway; even less that you wouldn't be able to do for yourself if you knew. Perhaps GP commenter is trying to keep it straight/restrict movement, let it heal - but that's annoying, if they knew it wasn't, just sore or whatever, then they wouldn't bother.
My own 'at home' wish would be for testing for levels of anything that's dietary, could then use it to have a meal deliberately high in whatever the lowest was (assuming not all high!) for example.
Knowing what's wrong for sure doesn't change course of action much -- not enough to warrant a visit.
Unless the bone has shifted out-of-position, the doctor will tell you to go easy on it for a few weeks, and perhaps buddy-tape a toe.
I agree diet would be awesome. The difference is the techniques I know are... intrusive. I don't quite know how an at-home blood draw would work. I do know enough that an at-home ultrasound, EKG/EEG/EMG, and several other techniques can be made cheap, practical, and harmless.
EKG/EEG/EMG can be DIYed for $10. Ultrasound, last I looked a few decades ago, would require a lot of new tech to make cheap, but nothing sci-fi grade. Developing LCD panels, integrated circuits, or e-ink were harder problems.
The fractured bone is a different case, because you have reason to suspect something. That makes a lot of sense. But general unprompted scanning is not necessarily a good idea.
For example, if the system told me I had a 1% chance of having a cancer somewhere, due to a small lump, I could decide if it's worth pursuing. On the other hand, if it told me I had a 99.99% chance of having a rapidly growing cancer somewhere, I'd go to the doctor.
The big things would be caught early.
The little things -- they could be tracked. If I have a pinhead-sized growth, and it's staying fixed, it's probably okay. If it's doubling every day, I might want to get it checked out.
On my end, I automatically apply a filter to anything I see coming out of MIT. If MIT announces nuclear fusion, I assume it's a lemon with a piece of zinc and copper behind-the-scenes, and some good old-fashioned salesmanship and grandstanding.
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2022/07/24/medicine-and-the-metavers...
"This research was funded, in part, by MIT, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT."
I see quite a strong military presence among the funders, which could imply this research will progress really fast and turn soon into a real thing, but sadly it also could imply it won't be available to the public for some time.
The study also includes lead authors Chonghe Wang and Xiaoyu Chen, and co-authors Liu Wang, Mitsutoshi Makihata, and Tao Zhao at MIT, along with Hsiao-Chuan Liu of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
It's likely all or most of the researchers were immigrants/foreign. And yet we have overly restrictive immigration policies for high skilled workers that basically means we educate them and then return them back to their country.
"stickers that can see inside the body" = elastomer adhesive