New technique to improve melanoma detection, treatment

Combining three assays together, researchers have developed a new way to spot melanoma skin cancer cells circulating in the blood that could provide a new avenue for cancer diagnosis and therapies.

With a new approach to spot melanoma skin cancer cells circulating in the blood, the researchers raised detection rates to 72 per cent which is higher than using one test, said the study published in the British Journal of Cancer. The research has the potential to significantly improve the monitoring of cancer patients and guide future treatment.

“These preliminary findings are a first step towards a new way to stop melanoma from spreading around the body,” said lead researcher Elin Gray, Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University in Australia.

“Cancer spreads around the body when circulating tumour cells (CTCs) shed from the primary tumour and travel through the blood to form secondary tumours (metastases) in other organs.

“If we can find a way to reliably detect these cells, then we have a chance to stop melanoma in its tracks with a powerful diagnostic tool and perhaps opportunities for therapies in the future,” Gray said.

Until now melanoma circulating tumour cells have proved to be incredibly elusive, with detection rates wildly varying from 40 to 87 per cent. “We now understand that CTC detection cannot be resolved with a one-size-fits-all approach,” she said.

“There is a huge amount of variety in the shape and bioactivity of these CTCs and so they all look different and respond differently to assay tests,” Gray said.

The researcher explained that melanoma CTCs are hidden among thousands of other cells and matter in the blood. Armed with a better understanding of the complexity of the task, the researchers tried a multifaceted approach to detecting melanoma CTCs. “By combining three assays together, we raised detection rates to 72 per cent, which was a significantly and consistently higher result than using one test,” Gray said.

“We are confident this approach is a move towards the reliable detection of CTCs, but we now need to tweak the assay to include a better combination to capture the broadest range of CTCs,” she added.

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     
https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement 

New technique holds promise for melanoma patients: Know how to deal with this condition

New technique that improves on existing methods for assessing risk of melanoma recurrence after surgical removal developed. But you need to be alert too.

There is good news for patients of skin cancer. Thanks to a new study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, there may soon be a new melanoma test that will be able to better predict recurrence and improve patient care. Researchers have developed this new technique that improves on the current method for assessing whether primary melanoma is likely to recur and spread, following surgical removal. Nature Cancer published this study.

Most people first suspect melanoma when they see changes in the appearance of a pigmented spot like a mole or freckle. Though a primary melanoma can be cured through surgical removal, in some cases the lesion recurs and spreads. Unfortunately, there has been no major changes in the field of lesion analysis in the last hundred years. This puts patients at risk of recurrence at a disadvantage. But now, the new developments will lead to better patient care.

A treatable condition

Early stage melanoma is a treatable condition. But the problem with this disease is detecting it early. Usually, a diagnosis is made only after the cancer has progressed. A cure is difficult once the diseases has progressed. Hence, an early detection is essential for a favourable outcome from treatment. Be alert to any changes in the size of a mole or any changes on your skin. Consult your doctor to rule out this condition. Early detection can lead to a cure.

What you can do

You can bring down your risk of melanoma significantly by taking a few precautions besides being alert to any changes on your skin surface. Avoid excessive sun exposure. If you spend a lot of time in the sun, wear protective clothing. Nowadays, you can buy sun-block shirts. You can try these out. Always use sunscreen and re-apply every 8 hours.

Know the ABCDE method of detecting skin cancer
You can use the ABCDE method to determine if a mole or freckle may be melanoma. This is what you need to look out for.

A: Asymmetrical: Healthy moles are symmetrical and cancerous ones are asymmetrical. Just draw a line through the middle of your mole to see if there is any asymmetry.

B: Border: If the border of your mole is ragged, raised or notched, it may be cancerous.

C: change in colour: All healthy freckle and mole have uniform colour. If there is any color variation, it may be because of cancer. Look out for different shades of tan, red, brown, blue, white and black.

D: diameter: If your mole is bigger than 6 millimeters, it may be cancerous.

E: evolving: Keep an eye out for any new moles and marks on your body. Also check to see if there are any changes in the colour or size of existing moles.

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     
https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement 

Scientists develop new technique to spot melanoma skin cancer

While melanoma is less common than some other types of skin cancer, it is most serious as it often spreads. 

Researchers have developed a new way to spot melanoma skin cancer cells circulating in the blood that can raise detection rates to 72 per cent. The research could provide a new avenue for cancer diagnosis and therapies.

The research team is led by Elin Gray, Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University in Australia. They tried a multifaceted approach to detecting melanoma circulating tumour cells (CTCs) by combining three assays together.

Until now melanoma circulating tumour cells have proved to be incredibly elusive, with detection rates wildly varying from 40 to 87 per cent.

The researchers are hopeful that these preliminary findings could lead to the development of a powerful diagnostic tool and a new way to stop melanoma from spreading around the body.

Melanoma skin cancer: Causes and types

While melanoma is less common than some other types of skin cancer, it is most serious as it often spreads. This cancer occurs when pigment producing cells called melanocytes mutate and begin to divide uncontrollably.

Melanomas can develop anywhere on the skin, but they are most likely to affect the chest, back, face and legs. While legs are the most common site in women, this cancer is most likely to affect the chest and back in men. However, melanoma can also occur in the eyes and other parts of the body, including the intestines (though it happens rarely).

There are four types of melanoma: Superficial spreading melanoma, Nodular melanoma, Lentigo maligna melanoma and Acral lentiginous melanoma.

Superficial spreading melanoma is the most common type of melanoma, and it often appears on the trunk or limbs.

Lentigo maligna melanoma are common in older adults, especially in parts of the body that have had excessive sun exposure over several years, like the face.

Risk factors for melanoma include:

    Overexposure to the sun
    Having fair skin
    A family history of melanoma
    a high number of moles
    a previous organ transplant
    the presence of actinic lentigines, also known as liver spots or age spots
    older age

Of these risk factors, only sun exposure is preventable. So, avoid overexposure to the sun and prevent sunburn to lower your risk of skin cancer. If you see any changing or growing moles, get it checked as soon as possible.

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     
https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement 

Scientists discover new technique that shows how cancer cells grow

Researchers have observed how stem cell mutations quietly arise and spread throughout a widening field of the colon until they eventually predominate and become malignant. Using an innovative modelling system in mice, the researchers visually tagged  colon cancer mutations by causing stem cells to glow. Mutations found in colon cancer were then visualised in the animals, illuminating a sort of tournament-to-the-death underway in the intestine in which one or another mutation prevailed over the others to become the driving force of a malignancy.

Joshua Snyder, PhD, assistant professor in the Departments of Surgery and Cell Biology at Duke University, said: “This study provides new insight into the previously invisible process in which mutant precancerous stem cells spread throughout the colon and seed cancer.” The study was published in the journal of Nature Communications.

“Our technique sets a firm foundation for testing new therapies that interrupt this early, pre-malignant process. We hope to one day target and eliminate these stealth precancerous cells to prevent cancer,” Snyder said.

In this way, the researchers found key differences in how the intestinal habitats common to babies and adults grow pre-cancerous fields of mutant cells. At a critical period, new born babies are sensitive to the effects of mutations within intestinal stem cells.

This insidiously seeds large fields of premalignant mutated cells throughout the intestine — a process called field cancerization — that dramatically increases cancer risk. These fields of mutated cells can grow and spread for years without being detected by current screening technologies; often, they remain harmless, but under proper conditions, these can rapidly become cancerous later in adults.

The researchers also observed that some colon cancer mutations found in patients can lead to a striking increase in the fertility of the environment surrounding precancerous fields. Ultimately, this leads to the rapid spread of fields throughout the intestine, with lethal consequences. Certain common mutations that arise from external sources, such as an injury or an environmental exposure, could also disrupt the environment surrounding the stem cell and lead to the rapid growth and spread of precancerous fields.

These occurrences can be especially lethal in adults and occur much more rapidly than previously expected — as if dropping a match on a drought-stricken forest. “Field cancerisation has been suggested to be the defining event that initiates the process of cancer growth, including cancers of the breast, skin, and lung,” said Snyder.

“Our technique allows us to model how premalignant cells compete and expand within a field by simple fluorescent imaging, potentially leading to earlier diagnosis and treatment.”

this is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     
https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement     

Novel technique to accurately detect autism in kids

Researchers have developed a new technique to help doctors more quickly and accurately detect autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children.

Researchers  characterised how children with ASD scan a person's face differently than a neuro-typical child.

They developed a technique that considers how a child with ASD gaze transitions from one part of a person's face to another.

The use of this technology, described in the journal, makes the diagnostic process less stressful for the children and if combined with existing manual methods could help doctors better avoid a false positive autism diagnosis.

"Many people are suffering from autism, and we need early diagnosis especially in children," said a researcher.

"The current approaches to determining if someone has autism are not really child-friendly. Our method allows for the diagnosis to be made more easily and with less possibility of mistakes," she said.

"The new technique can be used in all ASD diagnosis, but we believe it's particularly effective for children,"she said.

The researchers evaluated 17 children with ASD and 23 neuro-typical children.

The mean chronological ages of the ASD and neuro-typical groups were 5.5 and 4.8, respectively.
Each participant was shown 44 photographs of faces on a 19-inch screen, integrated into an eye-tracking system.

The infrared device interpreted and identified the locations on the stimuli at which each child was looking via emission and reflection of wave from the iris.

The images were separated into seven key areas of interest (AOIs) in which participants focussed their gaze: under the right eye, right eye, under the left eye, left eye, nose, mouth and other parts of the screen.

The researchers wanted to know more than how much time the participants spent looking at each AOI, but also how they moved their eyes and scan the faces.

The researchers used four different concepts from network analysis to evaluate the varying degree of importance the children placed on the seven AOIs when exploring the facial features.

The first concept determined the number of other AOIs that the participant directly moves their eyes to and from a particular AOI.

The second concept looked at how often a particular AOI is involved when the participant moves their eyes between two other AOIs as quickly as possible.

The third concept is related to how quickly one can move their eyes from a particular AOI to other AOIs.

The fourth concept measured the importance of an AOI, in the context of eye movement and face scanning, by the number of important AOIs that it shares direct transitions with.

Currently, the two most favoured ways of assessing ASD involve a questionnaire or an evaluation from a psychologist.

"It is much easier for children to just look at something, like the animated face of a dog, than to fill out a questionnaire or be evaluated by a psychologist," said a professor.

"Also, the challenge many psychologists face is that sometimes behaviours deteriorate over time, so the child might not display signs of autism, but then a few years later, something starts showing up.

"Our technique is not just about behaviour or whether a child is focussing on the mouth or eyes. It's about how a child looks at everything," the Prof. said.

THIS IS ONLY FOR INFORMATION, ALWAYS CONSULT YOU PHYSICIAN BEFORE HAVING ANY PARTICULAR FOOD/ MEDICATION/EXERCISE/OTHER REMEDIES.                                    PS- THOSE INTERESTED IN RECIPES ARE FREE TO  VIEW MY BLOG-                                                                                           https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com/                                                                                                                                                FOR INFO ABOUT KNEE REPLACEMENT, YOU CAN VIEW MY BLOG-                                                  https:// kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com/                                                                      FOR CROCHET DESIGNS                                                                                                                                                                                     https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com

Affordable new tech for measuring brain blood flow

A new technique for measuring blood flow in the human brain, based on conventional digital camera technology, could be significantly cheaper and more robust than prior methods, say scientists.
The method could be used in patients with stroke or traumatic brain injury, according to the researchers.

“Our setup is very promising, and the cost should be lower,” said study co-author.

The new method, called interferometric diffusing wave spectroscopy, or iDWS, could prove to be less expensive when compared to an experimental technique called diffuse correlation spectroscopy, or DCS.

If you shine a light into a cloudy solution, light particles, or photons, will be scattered in different directions and DCS uses essentially this approach to look inside someone’s skull.

Laser light is shined on the head and as photons from the laser pass through the skull and brain, they are scattered by blood and tissue.

A detector placed elsewhere on the head, where the photons make their way out again, picks up the light fluctuations due to blood motion. These fluctuations provide information about blood flow.

But the light signal is very weak, and the further it passes through the skull and brain tissue, the weaker it gets.

So DCS requires a number of very sensitive, expensive single photon counting detectors. Moreover, boosting the light going in risks burning the patient’s skin.

The researchers, therefore, took a different approach, based on the fact that overlapping light waves will reinforce or cancel each other out, like overlapping ripples on a pond.

They first split the light beam into “sample” and “reference” paths.

The sample beam goes into the patient’s head and another, stronger, reference beam is routed so that it reconnects with the sample beam before going to the detector.

This boosts the signal, meaning that instead of needing about 20 photon-counting detectors that cost a few thousand dollars each, the researchers could use a single complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-based digital camera chip for a fraction of the price.

“The strong reference light enhances the weaker signal from the sample,” the researcher said.

An added advantage is that they do not need to turn off the room lights while making measurements with iDWS, he said.

Eventually, the researchers believe that may even be able to monitor brain blood flow outdoors, under bright sunlight.

THIS IS ONLY FOR INFORMATION, ALWAYS CONSULT YOU PHYSICIAN BEFORE HAVING ANY PARTICULAR FOOD/ MEDICATION/EXERCISE/OTHER REMEDIES.                                                                                                                                                                                                        PS- THOSE INTERESTED IN RECIPES ARE FREE TO  VIEW MY BLOG-                                                                                           https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com/  

FOR INFO ABOUT KNEE REPLACEMENT, YOU CAN VIEW MY BLOG-                                                                                                                              https:// kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com/                              
FOR CROCHET DESIGNS                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 https://my crochet creations.blogspot.com  

New techniques in removal of block in BLOOD VESSELS

THIS IS ONLY FOR INFORMATION, ALWAYS CONSULT YOU PHYSICIAN BEFORE HAVING ANY PARTICULAR FOOD/ MEDICATION/EXERCISE/OTHER REMEDIES.

PS- THOSE INTERESTED IN RECIPES ARE FREE TO VIEW MY BLOG-
HTTP:GSEASYRECIPES.BLOGSPOT.COM      

FOR INFO ABOUT KNEE REPLACEMENT, YOU CAN VIEW MY BLOG

HTTP://KNEE REPLACEMENT-STICK CLUB.BLOGSPOT.COM/

FOR CROCHET DESIGNS- http://My Crochet Creations.blogspot.com/

VID-20151114-WA0020.mp4

(1,781K)

 

click on the link above to see the video about the new techniques to remove blocks in blood vessels.