Advances in diagnostic imaging have benefited children with otolaryngologic disease, allowing shorter hospital stays, fewer invasive procedures, more targeted surgical procedures, and earlier and more precise diagnoses. However, despite improved technology, concerns about exposure of children to ionising radiation have recently come to the forefront, according to a commentary in the July 2012 issue of Otolaryngology

What makes laparoscopic surgery ‘minimally invasive’

Robot avatars have got a step closer to being the real world doubles of those who are paralysed or have locked-in-syndrome. Scientists have made a robot move on a human’s behalf by monitoring thoughts about movement.
The man-machine link joined a man in a brain scanner in Israel and a robot wandering a laboratory in France. The person controlling the robot could also see through the eyes of his electronic surrogate. The researchers are now working on ways to make the man-machine link more sensitive and to let people speak via the robot.
The research project connected a robot to a man having his brain scanned using fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). This monitors blood flowing through the brain and can spot when areas associated with certain actions, such as movement, are in use.
Using brain scanners is a step beyond current efforts to link up men and machines. Much recent work involved teleoperated robots in which humans manipulate controls, such as joysticks, to make a robot move.
By contrast, the scanning approach is more subtle and attempts to fool the human subject into thinking that they are embodied in the robot.
Eventually the small robot will be swapped for one the size of an average human The experiment helping to prove the technology works linked up student Tirosh Shapira who was in a lab at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, with a small two-legged robot thousands of kilometres away at Beziers Technology Institute in France.
Prior to connecting the two, researchers made Mr Shapira think about different sorts of movements and developed software that could quickly spot his intention.
The result was that he could control the robot in almost real time.
The illusion of embodiment was tested by surprising Mr Shapira with a mirror so he could see his robot self – a test that convinced him he was present in the French lab.
The next step for the research is to refine it to use a different type of scanning that can work using a skull cap rather than an fMRI machine that a person has to lie in. The robot used to represent a human is to be upgraded to a version that has a similar stature and gait to a real person.
The research is part of an international project called Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-Embodiment that aims to refine ways to link people and surrogates in both virtual environments and the real world.
Work is being done on medical applications of the technology but the researchers warned that it was a long way from being able to help anyone yet. BBC

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

A new study suggests that echocardiography be included as part of screenings to help identify student athletes with heart problems that could lead to sudden death.
The Cincinnati Children