iphone
ResolutionMD demonstrates how highly advanced CT & MRI manipulation can be done on a smartphone
The ability to review patients’ imaging studies on smartphones is a natural progression for mobile physicians. Most hospital PACS (Picture archiving and communication system) now allow viewing not only on any hospital computer but often from home PCs. The ability to view the same images from your iPhone would be a great boon for many physicians and several contenders are already en route to market or have arrived. In addition the extremely dense pixel resolution of the iPhone 4 Retina Display makes it an obvious target for mobile radiology viewers.
In the past, this site has reviewed two applications already available on the iPhone, eFilm (review) and OsiriX (review). One problem that any mobile imaging viewer has to contend with is the vast amount of data (in Mb) of a DICOM image set and the processing power required to perform 2d and 3d transformations. For example, OsiriX stores all the data locally on the iPhone, using WiFi to transmit whole data sets to the phone or performing queries to the PACS server to request data sets to be sent to the phone.
GPS enabled albuterol inhaler helps patients localize their asthma triggers
Are there patterns to the usage of albuterol inhalers that would help patients identify their triggers ? It is reasonable to expect that an individual over time would become familiar with the times of day or locations that are more likely to trigger their asthma. But, what if a single neighborhood or a particular event caused a widespread flare up of asthma – how do we track what populations of patients are experiencing in real time ?
Asthmapolis is a company and research project that aims to answer that question for asthma using a compact wireless device that records time and location on patients’ use of their albuterol inhalers. The service is voluntary, anonymized and opt-in. In a newspaper article, the study leader David Van Sickle, PhD remarked that in a pilot study [Columbia Daily Tribune]
…participants were surprised by the number of times they used their inhalers or where they were when they started to feel short of breath. …and surprised to see they had been relying on their inhalers more often than they thought.
In addition to serving as a mobile patient diary, the technology behind Asthmapolis is being used a in a large scale study of rural asthma. Mobile health technologies seem well suited for chronic diseases where the the long term cycles of diseases may be obscured to both the patient and the physician. It would seem arming patients with  tools to collect real-time data, would be a superior strategy to relying on their recall or occasional physician office visits to collect that information.
Residency Rater helps family medicine-bound medical students choose a residency
By: Darwin Wan, MS2
Fourth year is a tumultuous time for medical students. Although the toll of clerkships starts to grind down, students now find themselves faced with the difficult dilemma of choosing among dozens, sometimes hundreds of residency programs for further training.
For students heading to a Family Practice residency program, at least there is now an iPhone app that can help them make this difficult decision. Created by the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Wisconsin Madison, Residency Rater [iTunes link] helps medical students organize their thoughts using a series of criteria and checklists with which they can score different family medicine programs.
By providing a neat and convenient way for users to score programs on multiple criteria, this free app stimulates graduating students to consider all aspects of the program before coming to a decision – an important consideration since the computerized residency match program does not allow students to change their minds once they have submitted their choices.
Glaucoma Handbook hopes to eliminate non-compliance using a powerful tool: patient education
Glaucoma Handbook is an iPhone/iPad app whose production was directed by glaucoma specialist Dr. Jaewan Choi.
Dr. Choi wrote that he produced the app in order to dispel common myths and misconceptions about this insidious and dangerous eye disease which left untreated can lead to blindness.
From the first screen which tells us that Ray Charles lost his eyesight because of glaucoma, Dr. Choi aims the application at patients who live with the disease but do not always seem to understand it. As a young doctor, he said he sometimes used to privately wonder
Why don’t my patients understand my explanations ?
How the Documents To Go app can be used in medicine [iPhone]
By: Darwin Wan, B.Sc, MS2
Business users have long enjoyed the company of their Microsoft Office documents at all times in the form of the preloaded Documents To Go software on their Blackberries. Now, this venerable application looks to be acquainted with medical students.
While it’s not strictly a medical application, the universal (iPhone/iPad compatible) Documents To Go app ($9.99) gives mobile devices a very fundamental ability: the ability to view, edit and create Word and Excel files, the ability to view PDF, Powerpoint, and iWork files and the ability to sync the device with folders on a computer. The premium edition ($14.99) also includes Powerpoint editing, Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, iDisk & SugarSync support.
Airstrip Critical Care gets FDA approval and can begin deploying real-time iPhone monitoring to hospital ICUs
Airstrip Technologies produces several highly designed mobile applications for real time off-site monitoring of patients. It started with Airstrip OB, which allowed real-time fetal heartbeat monitoring on the iPhone. This remarkable app (iTunes) has two components, a server component installed by the hospital that can interface with the majority of hospital monitoring systems, and apps deployed to physicians’ iPhones. The hospital pays for the server unit, the apps are free. Airstrip technologies was  previously highlighted on this site (video).
From the press release:
With FDA clearance in place, AirStrip now extends its virtual real time remote patient monitoring technology to a broad array of acute patient clinical settings, which include the intensive care unit, the emergency department, the operating room, the neonatal ICU, and virtually any other care environment.
Since initially developing Airstrip OB, the company has refined a technology infrastructure for real time communication that it calls the “Airstrip OBSERVER Suite™” that allows it to more easily expand into other sectors and multiple mobile platforms.
Side effects of multi-touch screens on the iPhone, iPad, and other devices being studied by Arizona State researchers
One of the main reasons Apple changed the phone industry was with their roll out of a multi-touch capacitive touch screen phone, the iPhone 2G. The multi-touch display on the iPhone and iPad allows users to use pinch to zoom functionality, along with a whole host of other gestures. Basically, when you see someone “flicking” their iPhone or iPad screen – thank the muti-touch display for enabling this.
Other companies have quickly followed suit with multi-touch displays, and currently there are tens of millions of devices that utilize them. Over time, the use of these gestures adds up – and yet with millions of multi-touch users, no one knows the musculoskeletal side effects these gestures could potentially produce. A team of researchers hopes to change this lack of knowledge.
Dr. Kanav Kahol, an assistant professor in ASU’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, is leading a team of researchers from Arizona State and Harvard with the goal of studying potential side effects of multi-touch displays, and how these systems can be designed to cause the least amount of musculoskeletal harm. They have a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation for their research.
Radiation Passport helps physicians and patients determine cancer risk and cumulative radiation exposure in diagnostic imaging [App Review]
Radiation Passport aims to fulfill an important need: to quantify the cancer risk for the various diagnostic imaging studies and to add up the cumulative exposure and cancer risk for one patient. The app makers explicitly invite lay persons to track their own cumulative dose (thus the monicker “passport”) but the design and vocabulary appear to be targeted more toward physicians.
While the diagnostic benefits of modern imaging techniques are easily appreciated, the risk of exposure to ionizing radiation is less well understood. This question has become more acute as recently published studies attempting to quantify cancer risk from diagnostic radiation were widely picked up by media outlets. I can attest that, in recent months, many of my patients have brought up this coverage when I ordered scans. At the same time, I have also decreased orders for CT scans and even x-rays in my pediatric patients.
Google’s Android OS strategy is following Microsoft’s lead – not Apple’s
We’re giving away 5 promo codes for one of the most popular PDF readers in the App Store via the comments section of this post. Â We’ve reviewed it on this site before and now the app is boasting some significant upgrades.
There were fireworks at the recent Google developer conference (“Google I/O”). Some of this was well deserved excitement around features found in the newest version of the Android mobile operating system (version 2.2, “Froyo”). Much of the fireworks, however, were due to loud, public taunting of the iPhone and Steve Jobs by senior Google executives.
Since everybody loves a contest, these statements by Google speakers were widely covered in the tech press and predictably stirred up heated comment threads throughout the blogosphere.
In truth, the schoolyard level of the rhetoric (see Kara Swisher) probably does not serve Google’s interests in the long run. This is because Google’s business relationships are symbiotic: Google needs its partners’ trust to continue delivering to Google, via their devices and services, massive amounts of user data for its primary business, which is selling advertising.
