Browse Technologies

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Vanderbilt researchers have developed a new system to detect the position, orientation, and pressure exerted on surrounding tissues of a wireless capsule endoscopy device.  Magnetic coupling is one of the few physical phenomena capable of transmitting actuation forces across a physical barrier.  Magnetic manipulation has the potential to make surgery less invasive, by allowing untethered miniature devices to enter the body through natural orifices or tiny incisions, and then maneuver with minimal disruption to healthy tissue.  In order to accomplish this goal, the pose (position and orientation) of the medical device must be available in real time.

Researchers at Vanderbilt have developed a system to estimate prognostic metrics such as the length of a hospital stay, recovery status at discharge, and overall health at discharge, using only baseline imaging and clinical information gathered early in the hospital admission process. This system can assist with medical group operations and planning, it can help to educate families and patients regarding prognosis, and can be used to automatically stage patients for clinical trials.

The present invention provides a PANACEA (Pneumatics Allow Nonmagnetic Actuation for Creation of Enhanced Alignment) polarizer system. This is an integrated assembly of pneumatically actuated, nonmagnetic hydraulic circuits that enable PASADENA chemicals to be efficiently stored, mixed, and reacted in close proximity or within NMR magnetic fields.

This technology allows the simultaneous detection of RNA transcript abundance (as an assay of gene expression) and protein abundance (as an assay of protein expression) from biological samples without RNA isolation, labeling or amplification. Existing technologies allow for very efficient determinations of protein abundance from a wide variety of biological samples. These methods are in widespread use and are based on mass spectrometry technologies. There are no available technologies that allow efficient and quantitative assessment of multiple RNA transcripts without a previous isolation followed by labeling and/or amplification. The most efficient technologies currently available make use of DNA microarrays to profile RNA abundance as a measure of gene expression. While very robust and useful, these technologies are very labor intensive and suffer from a number of technological drawbacks. This technology takes advantage of a number of existing methods and techniques and brings them together in a novel manner that greatly expands the state of the art for gene expression.