We all know that there are never enough donor organs available for the people who need them, and even among donated hearts, seven of ten go unused – partly because of the limitations imposed by transporting the organ ‘on ice.’ So, Massachusetts-based medical device company, TransMedics decided to remove the ice from the equation entirely and … keep the heart beating during transport.

Hearts would be the highest profile option here, but the technology extends to other candidate organs as well, and in all cases such “living organ transplants” not only extend the time window between donation and reception, but they also allow surgeons a chance to assess the donor organ’s function outside the body. As the company puts it, “Hearts beat, lungs breathe, kidneys produce urine, livers produce bile.”

You can see the technology in action in this video:

Click Image to View Animation

When you call your new CT scanner Revolution, it had better not be just the same old machine with a racing stripe – but GE Healthcare’s new machine is producing some truly impressive imagery.

Introduced a little over a year ago, but having just finished a six-month trial at Florida’s West Kendall Baptist Hospital, the Revolution increases the size of its digital detectors fourfold (from 4 to 16 cm) over previous models, which combines to increase resolution while reducing radiation dosage. (When CT scans can expose a patient to anywhere from 10 to 100 times the radiation from a normal X-ray, every little bit helps.) A faster scanning speed also helps obtain sharper images of moving organs, ie. the heart.

While not necessarily the first of it’s kind (as mentioned in the comments section of the GE webpage linked below), the animations and still scans at GE’s page are no less spectacular – so even if you know as little about the technology as we do, a visit to this page is definitely worth the trip.

…after last week’s rather sobering essay.

It’s an often repeated truism that early detection is the best defence against cancer. There are so many varieties of the disease that there will probably never be a cure or vacine for them all, but the ability to catch and remove them at the very early stages may well be a more attainable goal. Unfortunately, testing for many cancers require invasive and expensive procedures, and some forms, such as pancreatic cancer, frequently display no symptoms until they have advanced past the point of effective treatment.

Enter Jorge Soto, and his colleagues at Microculus. They’ve taken the fact that different varieties of cancer affect the presence of microRNA molecules circulating in the blood, and created a basic blood test that, using simple tools like the camera in an iPhone and a $500 dollar device (seen above), has already been able to detect microRNA expression patterns for pancreatic cancer, lung cancer and breast cancer. And rather than waiting days or weeks for a test result, this one takes about an hour.

What’s more, the machine is being designed in such a way that it can be used, anywhere in the world, by untrained personnel, in “not-so-optimal laboratory conditions,” and the creators have declared the design of the detection device open source, so researchers all over the world will be able to test it, experiment on it, and ideally, make their own improvements on it. (This openess on the part of the inventors may be as amazing -and as promising- as the technology itself.)

It’s early days, but the potential of the technology, and the possibility of near universal access can’t help but be encouraging.

You can watch the TedTalk by Soto by clicking on the image below, and there’s a more in-depth article on the technology available at Smithsonian.com.