Here is the latest batch of news from the medical products community. Please click the link for more.

A new study done at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, Baltimore, MD, described online in JAMA Pediatrics, show that in children catheters inserted in a vessel in the arm or leg and not threaded into a large vein near the heart are nearly four times as likely to dislodge, cause vein inflammation, or...

Many medical implants use hard materials that connect to or pass through soft body tissue. This mechanical mismatch can lead to problems like skin breakdown at abdominal feeding tubes in stroke patients and where wires pass through the chest to power assistive heart pumps. So researchers at Case Western Reserve...

RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC, one of the world’s leading research institutes, has developed a prototype catheter that can generate live, streaming 3D ultrasound images from inside the heart. The device received a Cardiovascular Innovation Award at the 2013...

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Boston, MA, were awarded a $9.25 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to further advance a blood-cleansing technology developed at the Institute with prior DARPA support, and help...

A wireless personal health monitoring system using smartphones to upload data via the Internet will revolutionize the US healthcare industry, say its creators at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. mHealth capitalizes on what Dr. Emil Jovanov, associate dean for graduate education and...

When babies are deprived of oxygen before birth, brain damage and disorders such as cerebral palsy can occur. Extended cooling can help to prevent brain injuries, but, in developing nations where advanced medical care is scarce, this treatment is not always available. To address this need,...

Around 17 million people in Germany suffer from impaired hearing. A new device being developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA), Stuttgart, Germany, can, researchers say, improve patients’ hearing and can be implanted during outpatient surgery. Hearing...

Our previous Question of the Month focused on 3D printers. We asked if you thought their proliferation will negatively impact rapid prototype manufacturers. Responses were split 50-50. Here are a couple of sample responses, with more to come.

A new method of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could allow early identification of specific cancers, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, and other maladies, say researchers at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, and University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center. They explain that...

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, with the support of a $3.4 million National Institutes of Health grant, are working to develop an artificial lung to serve as a bridge to transplant or recovery in patients with acute and chronic lung failure. The project aims to develop a compact respiratory...

Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an emerging optical neuroimaging technology that indirectly measures neuronal activity in the cortex via neurovascular coupling. It quantifies hemoglobin concentration ([Hb]) and thus measures the same hemodynamic...

At the time of this writing I am just back from MD&M West in Anaheim. What a pleasure to meet with representatives from so many of the companies who have graced these pages and more still to come. This, coming right after BIOS/Photonics West in San Francisco, officially kicks off the medical device...

Now that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has published its long-awaited final rule implementing the Physician Payments Sunshine Act (Federal Register, February 8, 2013), medical device manufacturers can move forward to carry out a familiar task: complying with regulations.