Thousands of patients die each year in hospitals across North America due to medical errors that could be prevented were doctors and nurses provided with instant access to patient records via wireless technology. Cue the catch-22: the electromagnetic radiation caused by those very devices can interfere with electronic medical equipment and thus lead to serious clinical consequences for patients.

Luckily, that could soon change thanks to new research from Concordia University that helps define a clear rule of thumb for how close health-care workers with their Wi-Fi devices can be to electronic medical equipment.

In a study researchers from the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science assessed the risk that a medical device will malfunction when radio waves that emanate from portable devices like tablet computers are present in a hospital room.

Hospitals often specify that staff members carrying wireless transmitters not approach sensitive electronic medical devices any closer than a designated minimum separation distance (MSD).

Once daily bathing with disposable cloths with the topical antimicrobial agent chlorhexidine of critically ill patients did not reduce the incidence of health care-associated infections.
Infections acquired during hospitalization (health care associated infections) are associated with increased hospital length of stay, rates of death, and increased costs. The skin of hospitalized patients is a reservoir for infectious pathogens. Subsequent invasion by skin flora is thought to be a mechanism contributing to health care-associated infections. Chlorhexidine is a broad-spectrum topical antimicrobial agent that, when used to bathe the skin, may decrease the bacterial burden, thereby reducing infections. Chlorhexidine bathing is incorporated into some expert guidelines, according to background information in the article.
Michael J. Noto, M.D., Ph.D., of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and colleagues conducted a study in which five adult intensive care units in Nashville performed once-daily bathing of all patients (n = 9,340) with disposable cloths impregnated with 2 percent chlorhexidine or non-antimicrobial cloths as a control. Bathing treatments were performed for a 10-week period followed by a 2-week washout period (a period allowed in order to eliminate the effect of the first intervention before starting a new intervention), during which patients were bathed with non-antimicrobial disposable cloths, before switching to the alternate bathing treatment for another 10 weeks.
A total of 55 infections occurred during the chlorhexidine bathing period (4 central line-associated bloodstream infections [CLABSIs], 21 catheter-associated urinary tract infections [CAUTIs], 17 ventilator-associated pneumonia [VAP], and 13 Clostridium difficile) and 60 infections during the control bathing periods (4 CLABSI, 32 CAUTI, 8 VAP, and 16 C difficile infections). After adjusting for various factors, no significant difference between groups in the rate of the primary outcome (composite of these infections) was detected.
Other infection-related secondary outcomes, including health care-associated bloodstream infections, blood culture contamination, and clinical cultures positive for multi-drug resistant organisms were also not improved by chlorhexidine.

Scientists at the University of York have discovered a potential new treatment for prostate cancer using low temperature plasmas (LTPs).

The study is the first time LTPs have been applied on cells grown directly from patient tissue samples. It is the result of a unique collaboration between the York Plasma Institute in the Department of Physics and the Cancer Research Unit (CRU) in York

Speech is produced in the human cerebral cortex. Brain waves associated with speech processes can be directly recorded with electrodes located on the surface of the cortex. It has now been shown for the first time that is possible to reconstruct basic units, words, and complete sentences of continuous speech from these brain waves and to generate the corresponding text.

‘It has long been speculated whether humans may communicate with machines via brain activity alone,’ says Tanja Schultz, who conducted the present study with her team at the Cognitive Systems Lab of KIT. ‘As a major step in this direction, our recent results indicate that both single units in terms of speech sounds as well as continuously spoken sentences can be recognized from brain activity.’

These results were obtained by an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers of informatics, neuroscience, and medicine. In Karlsruhe, the methods for signal processing and automatic speech recognition have been developed and applied. ‘In addition to the decoding of speech from brain activity, our models allow for a detailed analysis of the brain areas involved in speech processes and their interaction,’ outline Christian Herff und Dominic Heger, who developed the Brain-to-Text system within their doctoral studies.

The present work is the first that decodes continuously spoken speech and transforms it into a textual representation. For this purpose, cortical information is combined with linguistic knowledge and machine learning algorithms to extract the most likely word sequence. Currently, Brain-to-Text is based on audible speech. However, the results are an important first step for recognizing speech from thought alone.

The brain activity was recorded in the USA from 7 epileptic patients, who participated voluntarily in the study during their clinical treatments. An electrode array was placed on the surface of the cerebral cortex (electrocorticography (ECoG)) for their neurological treatment. While patients read aloud sample texts, the ECoG signals were recorded with high resolution in time and space. Later on, the researchers in Karlsruhe analysed the data to develop Brain-to-Text. In addition to basic science and a better understanding of the highly complex speech processes in the brain, Brain-to-Text might be a building block to develop a means of speech communication for locked-in patients in the future. EurekAlert or KIT (in German)

Inventors at Nottingham Trent University are using smart materials to develop a low-cost steerable medical device to help doctors insert a life-saving breathing tube into a patient