New Injury Assessment Technology... Life Saving Potential ?

Here's something interesting, using enzyme logic gates to produce a 6 bit injury code, which can be used for real time injury assessment, this appears to have huge potential to save lives...

Logical injury assessment

With the aim of improving the survival rate of injured soldiers, US Scientists have designed a biocomputing system that is capable of diagnosing multiple injuries from a sample of urine or blood.

Explosions on battlefields can result in patients with multiple injuries that need quick diagnosis. Currently, this is done by physical examination and a comprehensive series of laboratory tests in hospital. When an organ is injured, the body releases chemicals that can be used as biomarkers to indicate particular internal injuries. Multiple injuries release a wide range of biomarkers and now a team led by Evgeny Katz from Clarkson University, and Joseph Wang at the University of California San Diego, have developed a diagnostic tool that can be used in the field and is able to differentiate between many chemical inputs to provide a diagnosis.

The system comprises six logic gates made from enzymes that are sensitive to twelve biomarker inputs associated with six different pathological conditions, including soft tissue injury, abdominal trauma and brain injury. The enzyme gates each produce a logic output (1 or 0), which together form a 6-bit 'injury code', that allows full diagnosis of the patient's condition.

more on the tech here:

Multiplexing of injury codes for the parallel operation of enzyme logic gates

The development of a highly parallel enzyme logic sensing concept employing a novel encoding scheme for the determination of multiple pathophysiological conditions is reported. The new concept multiplexes a contingent of enzyme-based logic gates to yield a distinct injury code corresponding to a unique pathophysiological state as prescribed by a truth table.

Cool, as a Paramedic I find this highly interesting! Thank you for posting this..will spend some time reading up on it

S'n'F

Edit - I would really like to see 'dictionary' of what the different codes that can be produced are. This could really be game changing stuff if it pans out to be small, inexpensive, and reliable/accurate.

For example, is there a code produced for broken bones? Currently everyone gets a neck brace and a back board after a car wreck! But despite our best efforts, and even x-rays in the ER every once in a while some one with a broken neck might be sent home.

But imagine being able to know for sure that someone does or doesn't have a fracture somewhere! Not only could this drastically improve patient care, but it could cut down on medical cost and needless use of resources. And of course it would help to better triage multiple patient incidents.

Talk about more Star Trek like technology becoming real! Exciting stuff!

[edit on 7/14/2010 by toepick]