Medical
Data capture: The new system takes many
samples of very small size to give surgeons instant information
J
eremy Nicholson is aman in a hurry. Not just in the way he speaks, which he does with great precision as well as speed, but in how quickly he wants the findings
in laboratories tomake it into hospitals. “Mostmedical breakthroughs thatmake
the news take 10 to 15 years to come into daily use. I’mvery confident that we will be producing information to assist decision making for people in surgery by the end of the year,” says Professor Nicholson, head of the department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College London. Nicholson is referring to amachine,
installed at StMary’sHospital in Paddington, west London, which can rapidly assess the condition of a patient’s sample to give a surgeon accurate information about his or hermetabolismin 20minutes. In layman’s terms,metabolismrefers to
the chemical activity in a body that occurs tomaintain life. As this is changing all the time, particularly in ill people and invariablymost acutely in patients in need of surgery, up to theminute information is vital. Being able to provide it to surgeons so quickly is a significant breakthrough. Armed with this information, surgeons
will be able tomake correct decisions about, for example, exactly where organs are diseased and so where they need to be operated upon. Currentmethods of analysis, at best, can take around an hour which, for the patient being operated upon, can simply be too long. Without any kind of analysis, the patient
Slick operation
The new technology of metabonomics aims to get detailed data about patient metabolism analysed fast and into the hands of the surgeons By Neil Wilks
is relying on the surgeon’s experience which, while itmay be extensive, introduces a human element whichmeans mistakes can happen.Mistakes which, in the best case scenario,mean the patient has to be operated on again. “People don’t often talk about the costs of doing surgery again,” says Nicholson. Themachine in question is a nuclear
magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer which forms the centrepiece of the new SurgicalMetabonomics Laboratory in St Mary’s, opened in January and co-led by Nicholson. The intention is for surgeons to take
several pin-head size biopsies, of only 10mg of tissue, during operations. The tissue would be analysed, itsmolecular fingerprint assessed and compared to a database to ascertain what is in the material and how healthy it is. This requires a bank of data to which the
samples will be compared, and this is the work going on now in the lab. “For every disease we build amathematicalmodel that we feed into a database,” says Nicholson. The work is in the early stages of creating that database, fromwhich
February 2011 ◆ Environmental Engineering ◆ 29
➾
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52