Optics/​Photonics

Surgeons may soon be able to use a system in the operating room that recognizes hand gestures as commands to a computer to browse and display medical images of the patient during a surgery. Researchers at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, are creating a system that uses depth-sensing cameras and...

A team of researchers from Duke University, Durham, NC, speaking at the ANESTHESIOLOGY 2012 annual meeting revealed that they have created an advanced tool to permit trainees in transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) to use an Apple iPad to obtain real-time instruction in viewing and interpreting 3D...

Medical Design Briefs News Online is kicking off Breast Cancer Awareness Month with new optical imaging technology developed at Tufts University School of Engineering, Medford, MA, that may provide doctors with new ways of both identifying breast cancer and monitoring individual patients' response to initial...

Current transcranial color Doppler (TCD) transducer probes are bulky and difficult to move in tiny increments to search and optimize TCD signals. This invention provides miniature motions of a TCD transducer probe to optimize TCD signals.

Laparoscopic surgery is minimally invasive, but it is also visually constraining. In contrast to open surgery, surgeons who work on different tasks are all limited to the same view. In a small in vitro trial conducted at Brown University, surgeons with their own views performed faster...

A technique developed by engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) enables researchers to focus light efficiently inside biological tissue. While the previous limit for how deep light could be focused was only about one millimeter, the Caltech team is now able to reach 2.5 millimeters. With...

Ear infections are the most common conditions that pediatricians treat. Studies have found that patients who suffer from chronic ear infections may have a film of bacteria or other microorganisms that builds up behind the eardrum; finding and monitoring these so-called biofilms are...

Tabletop femtosecond lasers are already used in eye surgery, but researchers believe that they may be the future of microsurgery, offering benefits in applications inside the body, ranging from repairing the vocal cords to removing small tumors in the spinal cord or other tissues. Scientists at the University of Texas...

University of Illinois researchers have developed a technique to computationally correct for aberrations in optical tomography, which could provide faster, less expensive, higher-resolution tissue imaging to a broader population of users. Real-time, 3D microscopic tissue imaging may be useful for medical...