Category Archives: Medical Devices

Metal Processing for Medical Equipment

Posted by on November 17, 2011 Comments Off

By metal pressing different metals can be processed and different medical tools can be created. This has helped medicine quite a lot because of the fact that development of new treatments and methods is extremely important. The development of different tools by metal pressing has enabled doctors to carry out much more sophisticated surgeries and procedures with minor damage for the patients and with the greatest success.metal pressing

The development of new tools and methods is so important for medicine that this cannot even be described in words. If there were no new methods developed for medical purposes, for testing, diagnosing etc we would probably still be drinking different herbal potions and we would never have been able do advance as much as we are now. Plague and other diseases that have killed millions of people in the past would still be killing people if these medical advances hadn’t been invented.

These different tools and methods enable people to easily treat and cure diseases that have been though to be lethal for many centuries and nowadays they are just considered to be another boring disease that can be cured in no time with the proper diagnose and medication. These advances in technology and medicine have also improved the precision and quality of all machines that surround and support doctor’s work. Doctors would definitely not be able to work as precisely as they do now with the latest technology and metal devices that they use.

Medical equipment makes doctor’s work far easier and this also improves their speed and the quality of their work. The finest electrical razor blades would enable them to work faster and more efficiently, with less blood and with less damage for the patient’s organism. What’s more, the doctor would feel less tired and would have much more energy which would reduce the possibility for mistakes.

To sum up, there is no single science that can advance without help from other sciences. For example, medicine wouldn’t be able to achieve anything unless physics provides doctors with new inventions and different high technological equipment.

FPGA in Medical Equipment

Posted by on May 25, 2011 Comments Off

The medical imaging semiconductor market will most likely be dominated by the Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) very soon. This is true, especially with the Xilinx FPGA. The medical field, especially the imaging sector, has plenty of expensive equipment such as the ultrasound, and the magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Those who market this equipment must find a faster way in marketing these equipment and they must upgrade these equipment every now and then. Even though application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are cheaper compared with FPGAs, FPGAs will just take a short time for their development cycle. This means it can reach the market faster compared to the ASIC. FPGA, when used in the field of medicine, are reusable, reprogrammable and most of all flexible. Upgrading this medical equipment can only be done with the FPGA. This is why it is more preferable compared with ASIC. Now with the 3-D imaging of the imaging sector of the field of medicine; Xilinx FPGA will be collaborating with Siemens AG. Xilinx Inc. the creator of FPGA and Siemens AG are one of the largest suppliers to the field of medicine.

FPGA in Medical Imaging

This collaboration agreed to use FPGA in 3-D imaging platforms for medical imaging products created by Siemens AG. The Siemens designer team and the Xilinx designer team has decided to work together and team up to create a new FPGA-based programmable architecture for the 3-D imaging technology in the medical field equipment. This will make the high speed digital signal processing or DSP performance even faster. The computation capabilities of the VIrtex-4-SX platform will also be leveraged by this partnership.

 

Some of the functions of Virtex-4-SX are it allows high performance for imaging applications of medical equipment up to 512 DSP speed rate of 500MHz, it gives a DSP bandwidth of 256 GigaMAC’s per second, and it reduces the power consumption to 2.3 mW per 100Mhz.

 

Medical imaging these days demands for higher resolution and portable monitoring. This led to the fusion of diagnostic models, algorithm advances, greater device intelligence, and better device communications.

 

These demands can be reached by the Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs can give higher value programmable technology with no compromise. They will also never become obsolete because they can be reprogrammed and reused for other functions. This means the designer can create multiple models of the product because it is very flexible. It can also upgrade your products to meet new market demands. It can maintain and improve the product in a budget friendly manner.

 

Medical imaging equipment demand these functions the most. This is why FPGAs are best for imaging equipment in the field of medicine. Now with Xilinx and Siemen teaming up, the imaging sector of medical field equipment will become easier to use with a clearer resolution in their images. The imaging process requirements of this medical equipment will be reached by the FPGA. The demands of the new market will surely be reached with the use of FPGA on this imaging equipment.

Blood Sugar Meters – Getting to Know Them

Posted by on May 20, 2011 Comments Off

If one has too much sugar or glucose in his blood, then it can cause diabetes. So to make sure that the blood glucose levels in the blood are normal, regular checkups are needed. Blood glucose meters are useful for this purpose. These meters are manufactured keeping in mind the need for precision and accuracy. Since the early inception of these meters when it used to take up to two minutes to calculate the blood sugar level, the meters have evolved significantly, becoming smaller and faster, taking only 5 seconds to give the result. The research work on these meters has been done by medial institutes and monitored, regulated and tested by institutes like a Japanese CRO.

There has been a change in the technology used in the devices of today. The modern blood sugar meters follow an electrolytic method. There are some test strips incorporated which suck the blood up from the patient’s body. Then the sugar in the blood starts reacting with the glucose oxidase that is present in the enzyme electrode. Some oxidants acting as mediator reagents help to oxidize the enzyme again. These oxidants are generally complex ions like ferricyanide and osmium bipyridyl. A reaction occurs at the electrode which helps in the re-oxidation of the mediator. Ultimately, this concept is used to measure the amount of sugar present in the blood – the quantity of charge that is generated at the electrode is taken as proportional to the amount of blood sugar that reacted with the enzyme to create that charge.

Institutes like a Japanese CRO will make sure that the accuracy of the equipment is very high, which is usually recommended to be kept at no lower than 20% and ideally at around 85%. There are plenty of other electronic parts in modern blood sugar meters, irrespective of whether they follow the coulometric method or the amperometric method. These parts include operational amplifiers, digital to analog converters and vice versa, modulators and delay chips.

Once again, statistical analyses and testing of these instruments are carried out by organizations like the Japanese CRO.