<div class="page photo" style=""> <article> <header style=" background-image:url(/imageLibrary/7K0A0664_2250.JPG); "> <div class="box"> <div class="intro" style="color: #ff7f2a;"> <h1 style="color: #ff7f2a !important;">What's New</h1> <p class="summary"></p> </div> </div> </header> <div class="main"> <div class="container"> <p class="byline"> </p> <p><img src="/uploads/548a3e5560b12_2250.JPG" unselectable="on"></p><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4><a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/devices/human-life-is-a-gas" target="_blank">Human Life is a Gas</a></h4><p>Jan 15, 2016&nbsp; by John Boyd</p><p><img src="/uploads/56a06cc393f4b.png" unselectable="on"></p><p>Illustration: RMIT University</p><p>Changes in production of certain gases in the human gut have been linked to gastrointestinal disorders including painful constipation, irritable bowl syndrome (IBS), and colon cancer. Yet how and why this happens is not well understood. Without resorting to stressful invasive means, measuring and tracking gas concentrations in our stomachs and small and large intestines has to date been impractical.</p><p>That’s about to change. Researchers at <a href="https://www.rmit.edu.au/">RMIT University</a> in Melbourne, Australia, have designed and custom-manufactured indigestible capsules that can measure the concentration of different gases during digestion in the gut of animals and humans—a world’s first, they claim. The capsules meet the standards necessary for such testing, and after conducting a series of trials on pigs, the researchers have begun recruiting human volunteers on which to test the next version of the pill.</p><p><img src="/uploads/56a06d1436d55.png" unselectable="on"></p><p>Photo : RMIT University</p><p>An electronic capsule is composed of: an indigestible cladding; a gas-permeable membrane covering a sensor for detecting hydrogen, methane or carbon dioxide; a microcontroller; a 433-megahertz wireless transmitter; and four silver oxide batteries. The latest version of the capsule measures just 2.6 by 1.1 centimeters</p><p><a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/devices/human-life-is-a-gas" target="_blank">Read more</a></p><p><img src="/uploads/54ad19735dcd3_2250.jpg" unselectable="on"></p><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4></h4><h4><a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/decoding-a-babys-genome-in-26-hours" target="_blank">Decoding a Baby’s Genome in 26 Hours</a> </h4><p>posted&nbsp;23 Nov 2015 by Eliza Strickland</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>A specialty processor diagnoses critically ill infants in record time</strong></p><p> In intensive care units for newborn babies, genetic disorders are the leading cause of death, so diagnosing the problem quickly is paramount. Now, in a record-breaking 26 hours, pediatricians can scan and analyze the entire genome of a critically ill infant, thanks largely to a hardware system designed to handle the big data of genetics. In a <a href="http://www.genomemedicine.com/content/7/1/100">recent study</a> published in <em>Genome</em> <em>Medicine</em>, the unit reduced the time for the key analysis step from 15 hours to a mere 40 minutes.</p><p>The <a href="http://www.edicogenome.com/dragen/">Dragen Bio-IT Processor</a>, from the California-based company <a href="http://www.edicogenome.com/">Edico Genome,</a> plugs into a server and can be integrated seamlessly into a hospital or research facility’s existing workflows, says Edico CEO Pieter van Rooyen. This specialized add-on, he argues, provides compute power that would otherwise require expensive racks of servers or slow connections to the cloud.</p><p><img src="/uploads/56a21c261ea67.png" unselectable="on"></p><p><strong>A Better Baby: </strong>Quickly scanning a critically ill infant’s genome could help him survive</p><p>In a full genome scan, machines record the sequence of the 3.2 billion “letters” that make up a person’s DNA and look for the roughly 5 million variations that make that person unique. The plummeting <a href="http://www.genome.gov/images/content/cost_per_genome_oct2015.jpg">cost of such scans</a> is helping doctors find many new uses for them—and in the process causing a new conundrum. “Genetics will be the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAUzg5Hzigw">biggest big-data problem</a> that ever existed,” says van Rooyen. Others agree: A <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/diagnostics/the-human-os-is-at-the-top-of-big-data">study</a> in <em>PLoS</em> <em>Biology</em> predicted that within a decade the computation demands of genetic data will trump those of all other domains, including both astronomical research and YouTube.</p><p><img src="/uploads/56a21c7ce3f57.png" unselectable="on"></p><p>By getting from genome scan to diagnosis in 26 hours, researchers at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., demonstrated how speedy genomic analysis can keep up with clinical demand. For each critically ill infant, sequencing machines first did the brute-force work of recording a genome’s 3.2 billion letters. Using gold-­standard <a href="http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq_2500_1500.html">Illumina­ HiSeq</a> machines, researchers drove down the time this step takes from 25 hours to about 18 to 21 hours.</p><p><a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/diagnostics/decoding-a-babys-genome-in-26-hours" target="_blank">Read more</a></p><h4></h4><h4></h4> </div> </div> </article> </div><!-- /page-->