BMW brain scans?

Houston Chronicle:

If you're a fan of German engineering in your car, chances are you'll love it in your brain scan.

Local hospitals are trying to cross-pollinate health care with technologies that have roots in the automotive and aerospace industries. The hope is that, with a medical twist, high-tech navigation systems, pattern recognition software and top-of-the-line robots can revolutionize the treatment of everything from irregular heartbeats to lung cancer.

St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital says it is the first in the world to treat stroke patients with the help of a robotic arm that has its origins in systems created by Munich-based Siemens AG for precision welding on the assembly lines of BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

The medical robot, dubbed Artis zeego and manufactured by Siemens Medical Solutions, is coupled with a CT scanner and X-ray. It can tilt, turn and spin at virtually infinite angles, capturing detailed images that track blood flow.

Imaging is usually limited, requiring a lot of time and guesswork to get the right picture so doctors can tell what's going on inside an artery. But this robot is made with a memory for pinpointing locations, allowing it to snap back almost instantly to an exact spot should the doctor need to take a second look.

Tracing a tiny bubble deep in the brain only a few millimeters long is an arduous business. In some cases mere seconds matter and older equipment becomes a time-drag, says Dr. Michel Mawad, the director of Neurovascular Radiology at St. Luke's who is testing out the Artis zeego. Mawad is also a member of Siemens' medical advisory board.

''This takes the human error out. You can reproduce the exact angle every time," he says. ''We're being very careful. We're going very slow for now, but there's tremendous potential for speed here."

...

"Even though we've already hit the best outcomes for stroke in Texas, we're not settling for that. This allows us to do the most difficult patients," he says.

At The Methodist Hospital Research Institute, physicist Christof Karmonik is testing aerodynamics software used to build race cars to try to predict blood flows through potentially deadly aneurysms.

Fluids and air flow in similar ways, Karmonik says. So Methodist is using a program created by Pittsburgh-based Ansys to project the velocity and sheer of blood as it moves toward and through a bulging vessel. The goal: find alternate treatment options based on how fast the blood is traveling and how it reacts when encountering a hard surface, such as the wall of an artery.

''We want to understand how high and low pressure might result in different treatments. We want to understand why, even once aneurysms are closed off, they sometimes grow back," Karmonik says.

"People have started applying this to patient-specific images. It's not an abstract model of the geometry of an aneurysm any more."

Last month, Methodist cardiologist Dr. Miguel Valderrabano began using triangulation similar to that employed by global positioning satellite navigation devices to track heart catheters in his patients suffering from atrial fibrillation, a type of heart arrhythmia that puts people at risk for blood clots.

Instead of using satellites to zero in on the catheter, the Sensei Robotic Catheter uses three magnets to triangulate and locate the catheter, which is fitted with a magnetic tip. The device also measures electrical impedance on three axes.

...

This is pretty impressive stuff. It is happening in Houston, Texas, not Canada or the UK or Cuba. It is happening because these guys don't have to jump through governmental hoops to get the approval to try something new, and as far as I can tell it is happening without earmarks. The rest of the world should be so fortunate. In fact the rest of the world usually has to come to Houston for this service which tells you more about who has the best health care than surveys by groups wanting to promote rationed health care.

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