Quality Refurbished CT Scanners

Atlas Medical Technologies is a refurbisher of quality used CT scanners and used MRI equipment. As a comprehensive source for every facet of establishing a new imaging site, Atlas is unmatched in providing customer service, counsel and satisfaction on all refurbished CT and MRI scanner equipment and used imaging machines. With Atlas Medical Technologies, you'll have a seasoned partner who will guide you from site planning through installation. But it doesn't end there. Atlas backs each piece of imaging equipment we sell as well as our refurbished CT and MRI rental units, with an expert service team dedicated to sound equipment maintenance practices. You'll find Atlas is at your side, before, during and especially after the purchase of any imaging system whether it's a used GE CT scanner, mobile CT rental or MRI system. Visit our equipment pages or call your Atlas Medical Technologies consultant to determine the availability of your desired model and manufacturer of our refurbished CT scanners or new Philips CT systems.

Doctor blade for screen printing

In screen printing, flexible doctor blades are used for distributing the printing inks. They must be able to withstand a wide variety of stresses and strains and must also have good swelling resistance in contact with the ink solvents used in the printing industry. This is no problem for Vulkollan®, because it is free of fillers and plasticizers – a factor that contributes to its good chemical resistance.

With long printing runs, it is essential that the quality of the prints remains consistently good from beginning to end. Since the edges of the blades are subjected to considerable wear and tear, it must have very high dimensional stability. The high shear modulus of Vulkollan® and its low permanent deformation are key factors when it comes to ensuring consistent print results. In addition, the quality of the fabrics is rising all the time, increasing the strain on the blade material. Vulkollan's® high mechanical resistance ensures a long service life and considerably minimizes the work involved in subsequent sharpening.

This superior combination of properties – namely high mechanical strength and excellent chemical resistance – guarantees an extremely long service life even when the doctor blades are subjected to extreme conditions.

Sensor elements

To track down any corrosion damage or cracks in oil and gas pipelines, the workers use UCSD "go-devils" equipped with Baytec P sensor strips. Because Baytec P has such high elasticity, the sensor elements can always stick close to the pipe wall, even when they pass over pipe bends or travel through narrow cross-sections, thus minimizing measuring errors.
Other specifications made on the elastomer are particularly high resistance to wear and tear and outstanding swelling resistance.

Robots In CIS Applications

Robots have started receiving greater attention in medical/surgical applications. Tasks beyond human manipulation/precision capabilities are being trusted to assitant systems that only perform that small portion of the procedure, under human supervision. Despite intial skeptical response due to safety, and cost concerns the role of robots in surgery is likely to grow.

Surgical robots present an environment unlike most other applications where robots are applied. e.g. industrial plants. Mechanical components of surgical robots tend to be simpler, slower than their industrial counterparts, but the electronics, safety, and guidance systems are usually far more complex. A set of complex planning, guidance, and safety systems (often redundant) are involved in operating a surgical robot.

A team designing a surgical robot is faced with several difficulties. A complex system takes several years to develop, and development is often sequencial. E.g. The guidance system can not be tested until the hardware is available, and software developing and testing is highly dependent on availability of functioning hardware. Surgical robots are developed to deal with specific surgical procedures, and so each application results in the repetition of the design cycle.

A modular system allows software development to be independent of hardware design. It also allows existing modules to be used for new applications. It improves design clarity and testing and finally develops interfaces making interoperability between different systems easier.

There are several ways to develop modular/flexible software to control a robot: use/develop a programming language with all the facilities of object oriented design. But this would create yet another language, with a learning curve and user acceptance issues. An alternative approach is to develop interfaces, and implementations of the same in an acceptable programming language. This provides libraries that can be shared, swapped, and developed independently of each other. Furthermore, it allows the programming language to be changed, while preserving the interfaces (most programming languages provide ways of calling other language libraries, if need be).

The modular robot control(MRC) library is one such library. While the set of robots under consideration is mostly serial manipulators, the interface design can be easily extended to parallel architectures. The interface design is independent of the programming language, and the first implementation uses C++ classes. The library classes have a layered structure, each new Layer inheriting significant functionality from its parents.

This documentation is for the MRC library version 1.1 The class most commonly used by an application as an instantiable robot is the mrcRobot class and this should also be the base for all derived robot classes. Detailed implementation documentation exists separately.
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New Medical Breakthroughs

Upping the Odds of Survival

Stop an Epidemic!
Soon there may be a way to fight a pandemic before it has time to spread. The Hemopurifier, designed by Aethlon Medical, a small biotech company in California, is a blood-filtering device that removes viruses and toxins before infection attacks organs, using a method similar to dialysis.

The cool part: Treatment can begin without first identifying the infectious culprit. The blood cleaner comes in two sizes and is used with portable pumps or dialysis machines. The smaller version is the size of a large pen. It can be attached to an artery in the arm by emergency medical personnel, using only needles, tubing and tape. After filtering of the blood is complete (within a few hours), researchers can begin to identify the germ or toxin from blood samples. Aethlon's CEO, James A. Joyce, points out that it took about 90 days before the SARS virus was identified. With the Hemopurifier, you won't lose valuable time -- and lives -- while scientists in the laboratory try to figure out what they're dealing with.
Available: 1-2 years
-- Susan Doremus

Veer John Churchman/Photonice/Getty Images

Spider silk, combined with tiny glass beads called silica, creates a new material that could one day be used in growing and repairing human bones.

Cold, Cold Heart
More cardiac arrest patients are walking out of the hospital thanks to a "cool" procedure (three-quarters of them used to die). Medically induced hypothermia means cooling the blood and body five to eight degrees when oxygen flow to the brain and body has stopped or slowed. Combined with better CPR and more aggressive hospital care, it substantially improves the odds of survival and prevents brain damage, according to new research. Today, half to two-thirds of those people are alive and well.

"For years we didn't see much improvement in patients who suffered cardiac arrest out of the hospital," says Mary Fran Hazinski, RN, spokeswoman for the American Heart Association. "Now we've seen a dramatic shift, and hypothermia is one of the reasons." More than a quarter of U.S. doctors use the procedure, and more are expected to as further data becomes available.
Available: Now
-- Cynthia Dermody

Blood Backup
When it comes to emergency transfusions, blood may someday get the boot. Scientists are developing substitutes that could be used everywhere from ambulances to battlefields.

The oxygen-carrying resuscitative fluids are ideal for emergency, war and disaster scenarios because unlike real blood, they have a long shelf life, can be stored at various temperatures and may be given to anyone, regardless of blood type. Made from chemically modified hemoglobin, the fluids are also nontoxic and disease free.

PolyHeme, a substitute derived from human red blood cells, is being submitted for FDA approval. Meanwhile, the Navy is urging more studies of Hemopure, a blood substitute made with bovine hemoglobin. Some blood substitutes have been linked to increased risk of heart attack and stroke, so more research is needed.
Available: 1-3 years
-- Laura McClure

Microchip for Meds
Do you sometimes forget to take your pills? MicroCHIPS, Inc., of Bedford, Massachusetts, has developed a device that can be preloaded with up to 100 doses of medicine, implanted in the body and programmed to administer the drug via wireless signals. The new system has been designed primarily to help deliver medicines that are less effective when taken orally. It has been successful in preliminary tests with dogs.
Available: 5 years
-- Lindsay Miller

Exciting New Drugs!

Cervical Cancer The vaccine Gardasil (Merck), for girls and women 11 to 26, prevents infection from four strains of human papillomavirus (HPV), the main cause of cervical cancer.

Shingles Anyone who's had chickenpox is susceptible to the painful disease shingles. The Zostavax vaccine (Merck) is recommended for people over 60 at greatest risk.

Edwards Lifesciences

The compressible heart valve.

Whooping Cough The vaccine we get as babies wears off after about seven years, so we now have Sanofi Pasteur's Adacel (for people ages 11 to 64) and GlaxoSmithKline's Boostrix (for those ages 10 to 18).

Cancer Zolinza (Merck), a new medicine for cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, is also being studied for other types of cancer, including leukemia.

Diabetes Januvia (Merck), a once-daily pill for type 2 diabetes, is the first of a new class of medicines that enhance the body's ability to control blood sugar. With Exubera (Pfizer), a fast-acting needle-free insulin, diabetics simply puff on the asthma-type inhaler before eating to deliver insulin quickly, regulating blood sugar.

Heart One pill, three impressive jobs: The beta blocker Coreg CR (GlaxoSmithKline) reduces blood pressure and treats heart failure as well as post-heart-attack problems.

Smoking In trials, 44% of smokers who took prescription Chantix (Pfizer) for three months kicked the habit, versus 30% who used other drugs and 18% on a placebo.
Available: Now
-- Patricia Curtis

Cancer- Curing Creature
A scorpion's sting can be deadly, but scientists are now discovering that the poison may also be lifesaving. Researchers are using a man-made version of the venom of Israeli yellow scorpions to treat gliomas, aggressive brain tumors that are hard to fully remove by surgery alone. Of the 17,000 Americans diagnosed annually, only 8% survive for two years. A protein in the venom selectively binds itself to cancerous cells while bypassing the surrounding healthy ones. Combined with radioactive iodine and injected into the body, the venom targets and destroys the offending cells. Early results show that the treatment is safe and extends life in some patients, so a larger study with 54 people nationwide is now under way.
Available:5+ years
-- Neena Samuel

Nano-Knitters for Nerves
Researchers at MIT have found a way to restore vision in brain-damaged rodents. The innovative procedure uses nanotechnology to spur growth in damaged nerve cells. Scientists say the technique could someday be used to restore speech, hearing, vision and movement in people affected by stroke, brain trauma and spinal cord injuries.

How does it work? A clear liquid of amino acids is injected into the injured part of the brain. The amino acids assemble into a mesh-like structure that's similar to the body's connective tissue. This "scaffolding" allows nerve cells to grow and reconnect, restoring lost communication between the brain and the body.

MIT neuroscientist Rutledge Ellis-Behnke tested the solution in hamsters with severed optic tracts. Within 24 hours, the injured nerve cells began to regrow in both young and adult rodents. "The brain started to heal," Ellis-Behnke says. "We have never seen that before." Six months later, 75% of the animals had regained functional vision.
Available:5+ years
-- Laura McClure

The Anti-Aging Pill
What if there were a pill you could take to ward off the diseases that come with aging? Researchers at the National Institute on Aging and Harvard University may have found the answer: resveratrol, a substance found naturally in red wine. Even though scientists fed mice a high-fat diet, a daily dose of resveratrol protected them from diabetes, and they lived longer than mice who didn't get any. It's still unclear exactly how resveratrol works, but it seems to mimic the life-lengthening benefits of calorie restriction. No matter how much red wine you drink, it would be tough to get enough resveratrol (not to mention the side effects of alcohol), so pharmaceutical companies are looking to develop a specially formulated pill form. More research is needed to determine if the effects would be the same in humans, but if they are, we'll drink to that!
Available:5 years
-- Patricia Curtis

Liquid crystals could slash cost of X-rays

A LOW-COST way of recording X-ray images electronically could make digital X-rays scanners affordable in the developing world. The method can produce high-resolution digital X-rays for one-tenth of the usual cost.

Digital X-ray machines are prized because the images they produce are simple to analyse, manipulate and store. Most of them work by using a layer of amorphous selenium to convert the X-rays into electric charge. This "charge image" is then recorded using an array of transistors and other electronic components, akin to those used in some digital cameras.

However, the machines are expensive because these arrays have to be large: X-rays cannot be easily focused, so X-ray machines work by recording the shadow of an object rather than a focused image. That means the recording medium, be it an electronic imager or conventional X-ray film, must be at least the same size as the object being scanned. Digitally imaging a human lung, for example, requires an array up to 40 centimetres square with 10 million pixels, which costs as much as $200,000. This puts them well out of reach of most hospitals in the developing world.

A new device developed by John Rowlands and colleagues at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, could slash the cost of high-resolution digital X-rays. This low-cost alternative, which Rowlands calls the "X-ray light valve" consists of a layer of liquid crystal - which is opaque or transparent depending on whether an electric charge is present - covered with a layer of amorphous selenium. These layers are sandwiched between a pair of electrodes which generate an electric field across them.

When an X-ray is taken, the rays that hit the selenium layer generate a charge which is drawn towards the liquid crystal by the electric field. This makes the liquid crystal transparent at those locations. The overall pattern of transparency and opacity can be read off the liquid crystal layer using a light-based digital scanner (see diagram) and presented as a digital image. "We used an off-the-shelf light scanner and the X-ray images looked beautiful," says Rowlands.

After recording the image, the liquid crystal is reset by an electric field that restores its opacity.

Robert Street, an X-ray imaging expert at the Palo Alto Research Center in California, is intrigued. He reckons the X-ray light valve should be relatively cheap to fabricate.

Richard Lanza, an expert in X-ray imaging technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the idea is significant because it separates the read-out system from the X-ray mechanism. "Two-thirds of the people in the world will never have a chest X-ray to diagnose a life-threatening illness such as tuberculosis," he says, so cutting the cost of digital X-ray machines in this way could make a big difference.