IN QUESTI
MESI, ABBIAMO AVUTO MODO DI APPROFONDIRE GRAZIE AL DOTT. GIUSEPPE COTELLESSA
DELL’ ISTITUTO NAZIONALE DI
METROLOGIA DELLE RADIAZIONI IONIZZANTI (INMRI) DELL’ENEA, LE ENORMI POTENZIALITA’
DELLA SUA SCOPERTA, OGGETTO DEL BREVETTO
RM2012A000637 ENEA – 13-12-2012.
SVILUPPARE
UN NUOVO PROTOTIPO DI “RISONANZA MAGNETICA FUNZIONALE”, CON IL SOFTWARE RICAVABILE DAL SUDDETTO BREVETTO,
POTENZIEREBBE ENORMEMENTE LE POSSIBILITA’ DI STUDI COME QUELLO CHE
LEGGERETE QUA SOTTO.
E’ FONDAMENTALE PERTANTO, LA COLLABORAZIONE DI TUTTI COLORO
CHE ACQUISISCONO NUOVE INFORMAZIONI PER DIVULGARLE IN MODO DA FAVORIRE IL
PROGRESSO ETICO-TECNOLOGICO.
GRAZIE A
TUTTI COLORO CHE SI IMPEGNANO E SI IMPEGNERANNO IN QUESTO.
MLR
“Usa: nuovo test rivela quali
pazienti in coma “capiscono”'
“WASHINGTON – Un uomo in apparente stato
vegetativo da 12 anni è stato in grado – grazie ad una nuova tecnica sperimentata da scienziati
canadesi – di riconoscere il suo nome e
persino il luogo dove si trovava: l’esperimento realizzato alla
Western University nell’Ontario, apre per la prima
volta la speranza di poter un giorno riconoscere quali pazienti in coma abbiano
in realtà ancora qualche livello di
coscienza.
Gli
studiosi hanno utilizzato su tre malati in stato vegetativo un nuovo tipo di
risonanza magnetica chiamato “immagine
funzionale magnetica”:
Tutti e
tre i pazienti hanno risposto, in modo affermativo o negativo, ad alcune
domande basilari. Le risposte sono state date sotto forma dell’attivazione della regione cerebrale che era stata “addestrata” dagli scienziati ad attivarsi
di fronte alle parole si o no.
Il
paziente risultato più cosciente è stato Steven, un uomo in coma da 12 anni e ora di 38 anni
di età: mentre era nel tubo magnetico
e gli venivano letti e mostrati una serie di nomi con la domanda "E'
questo il tuo nome?", il paziente ha indicato “si” due volte al nome Steven. Ed
un chiaro “no” ai nomi Scott o Mike. Allo stesso modo quando gli si è chiesto: "Sei in un supermercato?, ha indicato “no”. Ma ha risposto
affermativamente alla domanda: "Ti trovi in un ospedale?".
Secondo
il rapporto altri due malati sono stati in grado di dare risposte affermative,
ma Steven è stato l’unico dei tre che ha replicato con chiarezza le risposte a
cinque mesi di distanza: "Ciò ci dimostra che le sue facoltà cognitive sono state abbastanza preservate", ha
commentato l’autore dello studio Lorina
Naci. "La nostra speranza – ha detto la ricercatrice specializzata in tecniche
avanzate di risonanza magnetica – è riuscire a discernere e raggiungere i malati che sono “intrappolati nel loro corpo”.
“Vogliamo dare loro un qualche
livello di autonomia nella loro vita".
Il
rapporto mette in guardia dal fatto che ovviamente non tutti i pazienti in
stato vegetativo mantengono qualche livello di coscienza (almeno per quel che
conosca a tutt’oggi la medicina – ndr). Il bioetico Arthur Caplan ha osservato che "è importante aver presente che i pazienti a cui è mancato l'ossigeno per un lungo periodo non sono presenti
mentalmente in quanto il cervello è troppo danneggiato".
Lo studio
evidenzia inoltre come con tutta probabilità
gli stimoli sui pazienti in stato vegetativo possono aiutare: la famiglia di
Steven ad esempio è sempre intorno al malato e
gli parla in continuazione.”
5 commenti:
DA DOTT. COTELLESSA
Sodium-detecting breast cancer scan 'can minimise biopsies'
Electrical engineering professor Neal Bangerter and his colleagues are working to develop new MRI methods for breast cancer screening
A joint research team is developing a new breast cancer screening technique that could reduce false positives and potentially minimise the need for biopsies.
Led by Brigham Young University (BYU) electrical engineer Neal Bangerter and University of Utah collaborators Rock Hadley and Joshua Kaggie, the group has created an MRI device that could improve both the process and accuracy of breast cancer screening by scanning for sodium levels in the breast.
‘The images we’re obtaining show a substantial improvement over anything that we’ve seen using this particular MRI technique for breast cancer imaging,’ said Bangerter, senior author on a study detailing the method in academic journal Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.
Specifically, the device is said to be producing as much as five-times more accurate images than previous efforts with an emerging methodology called sodium MRI.
Currently, there are two clinical imaging methods widely used for screening breast cancer: mammograms and proton MRI scans.
X-ray mammography is the most common screening tool, but the procedure involves x-ray exposure and is generally unpleasant. Mammograms are relatively inexpensive, but they still lead to biopsies when anomalies are detected.
Because of their increased sensitivity, proton MRI scans are generally used to further examine suspicious areas found by mammograms but they can produce false positives, leading to unnecessary interventions.
According to BYU, sodium MRI has the potential to improve assessment of breast lesions because sodium concentrations are thought to increase in malignant tumours.
Bangerter and his team said in a statement that they believe the addition of sodium MRI to a breast cancer screening exam could provide important additional diagnostic information that will cut down on false positives.
The team has developed a new device used for sodium imaging that is picking up a level of detail and structure not previously achieved.
‘This development by Dr. Bangerter and his group represents a major advance in the field of multinuclear MRI of the breast,’ said Stanford Professor of Radiology Bruce Daniel. ‘He and his group have invented a way to dramatically boost the sodium signal from the breast, enabling much better, higher resolution sodium MR images to be obtained. This should open the door to new avenues of research into breast cancer.’
So far, the technique returns high-quality images in 20 minutes, improving the odds that sodium MRI breast scans could be implemented clinically.
The MRI team’s goal is to produce a device capable of obtaining sodium and proton images without requiring the patient being screened to be repositioned for multiple scans.
‘This method is giving us new physiological information we can’t see from other types of images,’ Bangerter said. ‘We believe this can aid in early breast cancer detection and characterization while also improving cancer treatment and monitoring.’
DA DOTT. COTELLESSA
Researchers are developing a system that uses magnetic beads to detect rare types of cancer cells circulating in a patient’s blood, an advance that could help doctors diagnose cancer earlier. It could also monitor how well a patient is responding to therapy.
While other researchers have used magnetic beads for similar applications, the new ‘high-throughput’ system has the ability to quickly process and analyse large volumes of blood or other fluids, said Cagri Savran, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University.
He is working with oncologists at the Indiana University School of Medicine to further develop the technology, which recently was highlighted in the journal Lab on a Chip.
The approach is said to combine immunomagnetic separation and microfluidics. In immunomagnetic separation, magnetic beads about a micron in diameter are or coated (or functionalised) with antibodies that recognise and attach to antigens on the surface of target cells.
The researchers functionalised the beads to recognise breast cancer and lung cancer cells in laboratory cultures.
‘We were able to detect cancer cells with up to a 90 per cent yield,’ said Savran, who worked with Purdue postdoctoral fellow Chun-Li Chang and medical researchers Shadia Jalal and Daniela E. Matei from the IU School of Medicine’s Department of Medicine. ‘We expect this system to be useful in a wide variety of settings, including detection of rare cells for clinical applications.’
Previous systems using immunomagnetic separation to isolate cells required that the cells then be transferred to another system to be identified, counted and studied.
‘What’s new here is that we’ve built a system that can perform all of these steps on one chip,’ said Savran, also an associate professor of biomedical engineering. ‘It both separates cells and also places them on a chip surface so you can count them and study them with a microscope.’
Another innovation is the fast processing, he said in a statement. Other microfluidic chips are unable to quickly process large volumes of fluid because they rely on extremely narrow channels, which restrict fluid flow.
‘The circulating cancer cells are difficult to detect because very few of them are contained in blood,’ Savran said. ‘That means you have to use as many magnetic beads as practically possible to quickly screen and process a relatively large sample, or you won’t find these cells.’
The new design passes the fluid through a chamber that allows for faster flow; a standard 7.5-milliliter fluid sample can run through the system in a matter of minutes.
The beads are directed by a magnetic field to a silicon mesh containing holes eight microns in diameter. Because the target cells are so sparse, many of the beads fail to attract any and pass through the silicon mesh. The beads that have attached to cells are too large to pass through the holes in the mesh.
If needed, the cells can be flushed from the system for further analysis by turning off the magnetic field.
‘Not only can the cells be readily retrieved for further usage, the chip can be re-used for subsequent experiments,’ Savran said.
DA DOTT. COTELLESSA
Researchers demonstrate nanoscale MRI technique
30 September 2013
Illustration of the experimental setup shows the two unique components of the teams novel MRI technique that was successful in producing a 2D MRI image with spatial resolution on the nanoscale
A team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University has devised a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that delivers a roughly 10nm spatial resolution.
This is said to represent a significant advance in MRI sensitivity as modern MRI techniques commonly used in medical imaging yield spatial resolutions on the millimetre length scale, with the highest-resolution experimental instruments giving spatial resolution of a few micrometers.
‘This is a very promising experimental result,’ said U. of I. physicist Raffi Budakian, who led the research. ‘Our approach brings MRI one step closer in its eventual progress toward atomic-scale imaging.’
MRI is used widely in clinical practice to distinguish pathologic tissue from normal tissue. It is non-invasive and harmless to the patient, using strong magnetic fields and non-ionising electromagnetic fields in the radio frequency range, unlike CT scans and traditional X-rays, which use more harmful ionising radiation.
MRI uses static and time-dependent magnetic fields to detect the collective response of large ensembles of nuclear spins from molecules localised within millimetre-scale volumes in the body. Increasing the detection resolution from the millimetre to nanometre range would be a significant technological advance.
According to a statement, the new technique introduces two unique components to overcome obstacles to applying classic pulsed magnetic resonance techniques in nanoscale systems. First, a novel protocol for spin manipulation applies periodic radio-frequency magnetic field pulses to encode temporal correlations in the statistical polarisation of nuclear spins in the sample. Second, a nanoscale metal constriction focuses current, generating intense magnetic field-pulses.
In their proof-of-principal demonstration, the team used an ultrasensitive magnetic resonance sensor based on a silicon nanowire oscillator to reconstruct a two-dimensional projection image of the proton density in a polystyrene sample at nanoscale spatial resolution.
‘We expect this new technique to become a paradigm for nanoscale magnetic-resonance imaging and spectroscopy into the future,’ said Budakian. ‘It is compatible with and can be incorporated into existing conventional MRI technologies.’
DA DOTT. GIUSEPPE COTELLESSA
View into Disease Processes
View into Disease ProcessesThe world's first magnetic particle imaging (MPI) system will provide an unprecedented look into disease processes at the organ, cellular, and molecular level, helping researchers explore more effective drug treatments. The system creates 3D images by detecting the magnetic properties of iron-oxide nanoparticles injected into the bloodstream. In testing, the MPI system has accurately imaged the cardiovascular system of a mouse.
DA DOTT. COTELLESSA
Moving Closer to Stainless Magnesium
Moving Closer to Stainless MagnesiumIn a breakthrough for aerospace and automotive industries, researchers have discovered a way to dramatically reduce corrosion on magnesium, the lightest of structural metals. Adding small amounts of arsenic in the alloy, they report, retards corrosion rates. The arsenic acts as a "cathodic poison."
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