From now until September 30th, Springer Publishing has placed more than 300 of its Medical and Resident titles on sale.
With subjects that range from Pediatrics and Sports Cardiology to Geriatrics and “Criminal Poisoning,” there’s no way we can have all the eligible titles on our shelves, but you can browse them all and order direct to your door through our Virtual Bookstore.
Imperial College of London photo
In various news reports, it’s been called a smart scalpel, a magic scalpel, even a scalpel that sniffs, but regardless of the title, The Imperial College of London’s ‘iKnife’ could usher in a significant advance in cancer treatments through surgery.
When cancerous cells are surgically removed, frequently the most difficult aspect of the procedure is deciding where the tumor ends and healthy tissue begins. Taking too much healthy tissue has obvious drawbacks, while checking the borders of a growth during an operation requires keeping the patient under anesthetic while samples are taken to a lab and tested. Such tests aren’t always reliable either, and leaving cancerous cells behind could lead to new growth and the need for a second operation. (The Imperial College estimates that one in five breast cancer patients will need to make a return trip to the operating room.)
The iKnife uses an ‘old’ technology of an electrified knife (traditionally used to cauterize wounds even as an incision is made) along with a mass spectrometer to sample the resulting smoke and detect chemical profiles associated with tumors.This method of instantly analyzing the smoke to differentiate between healthy and cancerous tissue has racked up a 100% success rate during 91 test operations. Clinical trials are next, and the creators see other uses for the technology as well.
A detailed description can be found at the Imperial College London’s website here.
Cadaver disection has always been a fundamental way for medical students to learn human anatomy, but access to cadavers has always been a challenge (as we’ve seen here), and for obvious reasons, each specimen has a strictly limited useful life.
Enter Anatomage, a California based 3D medical technology company that got together with Stanford University’s Division of Clinical Anatomy and created the world’s first life-size 3D interactive virtual dissection table named, not surprisingly,The Anatomage Table. Recently featured on PBS during a 21st century ‘autopsy’ of King Tut, The Anatomage Table uses touch-sensitive interaction to allow the user to cut away layers of the body, rotate it in any direction, and limit the display to specific body parts like the skeleton or internal organs. Like any anatomy book, structures can be labeled, and those labels remain linked to their parts as the body is repositioned.
Of course, through the wonders of portable technology, anyone with a computer or tablet and the right software can experience similar applications on a smaller scale, but the level of detail and one-to-one scale of The Anatomage Table makes it a viable option to cut down (though not eliminate) the need for actual human cadavers – and as Jack Choi, CEO of Anatomage, mentions during a demonstration at a TED talk, if you make a mistake, the digital cadaver has “Undo.”
And let’s face it, it’s just very cool.