Stroke is the fourth leading cause of death and a common cause of long-term disability in the United States, but doctors have very few proven treatment methods. Now a new device that mechanically removes stroke-causing clots from the brain is being hailed as a game-changer.
In a recent clinical trial, the SOLITAIRE Flow Restoration Device dramatically outperformed the standard mechanical treatment.

SOLITAIRE, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in March, is among an entirely new generation of devices designed to remove blood clots from blocked brain arteries in patients experiencing an ischemic stroke. It has a self-expanding, stent-like design, and once inserted into a blocked artery using a thin catheter tube, it compresses and traps the clot. The clot is then removed by withdrawing the device, reopening the blocked blood vessel.

‘This new device is significantly changing the way we can treat ischemic stroke,’ said the study’s lead author, Dr. Jeffrey L. Saver, director of the UCLA Stroke Center and a professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. ‘We are going from our first generation of clot-removing procedures, which were only moderately good in reopening target arteries, to now having a highly effective tool.’

Results of the study showed that the device opened blocked vessels without causing symptomatic bleeding in or around the brain in 61 percent of patients. The standard FDA

Monitoring the effectiveness of the HPV vaccine in Canada requires that data from multiple registries and other data sources be combined. Linking registries can be problematic, however, since they are often managed by unrelated organisations. Privacy legislation may also restrict the sharing of data for such linkages. To address these challenges, Dr. Khaled El Emam and his team at the CHEO Research Institute have developed a secure protocol that allows the linking of individual patient records without revealing personal information.
According to Dr. El Emam, previous protocols were not secure or did not protect privacy; this new evidence-based protocol, however, is the strongest on record. It can be generalised for use in monitoring other conditions or diseases, or vaccination programs.
‘There is a need to do long-term evaluations of vaccines, and to monitor vaccination rates and how they vary by individual and family characteristics. Access to data to perform such surveillance is often challenging because of legitimate privacy concerns. Our protocol addresses these concerns directly and facilitates rapid data sharing,’ explained Dr. El Emam.
HPV, or the human papillomavirus, is one of the most prevalent sexually transmitted viral infections in the world, causing symptoms that range from genital warts to increased risk of cervical cancer. An effective preventative quadrivalent vaccine has been available in Canada since 2007 (and a second, bivalent vaccine was approved for use in 2010) and is regularly administered to girls through publicly funded school-based programs. The vaccine can potentially reduce health care costs and HPV-related illnesses and death, but the long-term effectiveness of the vaccine is not yet known. Further research is required to gauge the vaccine’s lasting impact on health and to inform policy decisions concerning the allocation of health resources.
The new protocol uses a number of cryptographic techniques, including a commutative hash function and homomorphic cryptosystem. The secure computation allows registries to match records on identifiers such as SIN, health card number and date of birth without revealing these values to anyone, and then perform analytics on the linked data without that linked data being disclosed. The protocol provides end-to-end privacy protection for surveillance programs and eliminates many concerns about sharing data.
‘We set out to assess the impact of the HPV vaccine by creating a secure protocol to link simulated databases on cancer, cervical screening, health care services and immunisation. Such linkage can only be done in an environment that is responsive to patient privacy concerns,’ explained Dr. El Emam. ‘The protocol we created would allow any public health unit to link databases from multiple sources and compute relevant statistics from linked data without revealing personal information, and hence, still provide strong patient privacy guarantees.’ Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute

Compared with historical reports, the use of stereotactic body radiation therapy in inoperable early lung cancer appears to result in longer 3-year and 5-year survival, Japanese researchers reported here. About 60% of 104 patients diagnosed with Stage IA non-small cell lung cancer achieved a 3-year overall survival and 40.8% were alive at 5 years, said Yasushi Nagata, MD, professor and chairman of radiation oncology at the University of Hiroshima, at a press briefing during the annual meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology.
According to Nagata, even though the patients in the study had very early stage cancer they were inoperable mainly because of their age and other comorbid conditions, as they were smokers, and their pulmonary function was compromised, so stereotactic radiotherapy was the better choice for them. He said that stereotactic body radiation therapy is less invasive, is believed to be effective against early stage lung cancer and was found to be feasible in patients with operable cancer.

Researchers have developed a new way to observe and track large numbers of rapidly moving objects under a microscope, capturing precise motion paths in three dimensions.
Over the course of the study researchers followed an unprecedented 24,000 rapidly moving cells over wide fields of view and through large sample volumes, recording each cell’s path for as long as 20 seconds.
‘We can very precisely track the motion of small things, more than a thousand of them at the same time, in parallel,’ says research lead and National Science Foundation CAREER awardee Aydogan Ozcan, an electrical engineering and bioengineering professor at UCLA. ‘We were able to achieve sub-micron accuracy over a large volume, allowing us to understand, statistically, how thousands of objects move in different ways.’
The latest study is an extension of several years of NSF-supported work by Ozcan and his colleagues to develop lens-free, holographic microscopy techniques with applications for field-based detection of blood-borne diseases and other areas of tele-medicine. Those efforts recently resulted in a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award, among others. Ozcan’s research is also supported through an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and an Army Research Office Young Investigator Award from the Department of Defense.
For the recent work, Ozcan and his colleagues–Ting-Wei Su, also of UCLA, and Liang Xue, of both UCLA and Nanjing University of Science and Technology in China–used offset beams of red and blue light to create holographic information that, when processed using sophisticated software, accurately reveal the paths of objects moving under a microscope. The researchers tracked several cohorts of more than 1,500 human male gamete cells over a relatively wide field of view (more than 17 square millimeters) and large sample volume (up to 17 cubic millimeters) over several seconds.
The technique, along with a novel software algorithm that the team developed to process observational data, revealed previously unknown statistical pathways for the cells. The researchers found that human male gamete cells travel in a series of twists and turns along a constantly changing path that occasionally follows a tight helix–a spiral that, 90 percent of the time, is in a clockwise (right-handed) direction.
Because only four to five percent of the cells in a given sample travelled in a helical path at any given time, researchers would not have been able to observe the rare behaviour without the new high-throughput microscopy technique.
‘This latest study is an extension of truly novel and creative work,’ says Leon Esterowitz, the NSF biophotonics program officer who has supported Ozcan’s efforts. ‘The holographic technique could accelerate drug discovery and prove valuable for monitoring pharmaceutical treatments of dangerous microbial diseases.’
The paper reports observations of 24,000 cells over the duration of the experiments. Such a large number of observations provide a statistically significant dataset and a useful methodology for potentially studying a range of subjects, from the impact of pharmaceuticals and other substances on large numbers of cells–in real time–to fertility treatments and drug development.
The same approach may also enable scientists to study quick-moving, single-celled micro-organisms. Many of the dangerous protozoa found in unsanitary drinking water and rural bodies of water have only been observed in small samples moving through an area that is roughly two dimensional. The new lens-free holographic imaging technique could potentially reveal unknown elements of protozoan behaviour and allow real-time testing of novel drug treatments to combat some of the most deadly forms of those microbes. National Science Foundation