Tag Archives: Massachusetts General Hospital

Jugaadathon- India’s First Open Source Healthcare Hackathon, Kolkata

Jugaadathon is India’s first open healthcare hack-a-thon which will involve professionals and students from diverse backgrounds – coders, hobbyists, designers, health experts, clinicians and technology entrepreneurs – from across India and also from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

 

About Event

The event, to be held in Kolkata from 24th-26th January, 2014, will bring together more than 100 participants who will put on their creative hats and work together to discuss and address real world medical problems by developing new and innovative solutions, ranging from At-home Monitoring Solutions, Mobile Applications, Improved Software Algorithms for Healthcare Applications or Medical Equipment for Hospital Usage.

Biomedical Software for Seizure detection in Epilepsy

Sridevi Sarma’s research focuses on a system with three components: electrodes implanted in the brain, which are connected by wires to a neurostimulator or battery pack, and a sensing device, also located in the brain implant, which detects when a seizure is starting and activates the current to stop it. (Credit: Illustration by Greg Stanley/JHU)

 Epilepsy affects 50 million people worldwide, but in a third of these cases, medication cannot keep seizures from occurring. One solution is to shoot a short pulse of electricity to the brain to stamp out the seizure just as it begins to erupt. But brain implants designed to do this have run into a stubborn problem: too many false alarms, triggering unneeded treatment. To solve this, Johns Hopkins biomedical engineers have devised new seizure detection software that, in early testing, significantly cuts the number of unneeded pulses of current that an epilepsy patient would receive.

Biomaterials Research: Synthetic Material to replace Vocal Cords

In 1997, the actress and singer Julie Andrews lost her singing voice following surgery to remove noncancerous lesions from her vocal cords. She came to Steven Zeitels, a professor of laryngeal surgery at Harvard Medical School, for help.

Zeitels was already starting to develop a new type of material that could be implanted into scarred vocal cords to restore their normal function. In 2002, he enlisted the help of MIT’s Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, an expert in developing polymers for biomedical applications.

Introduction to Tissue Engineering For UnderGraduates

OVERVIEW

  • What is tissue engineering?
  • Basics of tissue engineering
  • Role of the engineer

Tissue Engineering is “an interdisciplinary field that incorporates and applies the principles of engineering and life sciences toward the development of biological substitutes that restore, maintain, or improve tissue organ or function” (R. Langer, Science,
260:920-926, 1993)

It can also be explained as “the development and manipulation of laboratory grown molecules, cells, tissues, or organs to replace or support the function of defective or injured body parts” (Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative)

Why Tissue Engineering?

Why we needed Tissue Engineering, Why other Fields were not Good enough?