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nanobots in blood.

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http://www.westerntrust.hscni.net/about/3354.htm - Patients given Latest Technology to Self-Check-In at Altnagelvin Hospital’s Emergency Department. The information patients enter using self check in will automatically be matched to their patient record on the trust patient administration system, it will ask you to state your injury and rate it 1-10 

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http://www.westerntrust.hscni.net/about/3354.htm - Patients given Latest Technology to Self-Check-In at Altnagelvin Hospital’s Emergency Department. The information patients enter using self check in will automatically be matched to their patient record on the trust patient administration system, it will ask you to state your injury and rate it 1-10 

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ddeZ1NNiOOc

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Valery Spiridonov will undergo the first ever human head transplant

The 31-year-old is wheelchair reliant due to a muscle-wasting disease

Operation will allow him to walk for the first time in his adult life

His pioneering procedure is expected to take place in December 2017

His surgeon - dubbed Dr Frankenstein will reveal more in September

The terminally ill man who is set to become the world's first head transplant recipient says more details about his extraordinary surgery will be revealed next month.

Valery Spiridonov, a computer scientist from Russia, is set to undergo the risky procedure next year.

Today, the 31-year-old is wheelchair reliant due to a muscle-wasting disease, announced his neurosurgeon would explain how the plan was progressing in September.

Mr Spiridonov says he is ready to put his trust in controversial surgeon Dr Sergio Canavero who claims he can cut off his head and attach it to a healthy body.

Neither the exact date or location have been chosen yet, but the world first procedure is aimed to take place in December 2017.

And speaking at a press conference, he said his Italian surgeon - dubbed Dr Frankenstein - will reveal more soon.

Mr Spiridonov said: 'I continue the dialogue with Mr Canavero, we exchange information and as far as I know, he is preparing a portion of news this September.'

Severely handicapped, Mr Spiridonov received worldwide coverage when he volunteered as a guinea pig for the operation.

He suffers from Werdnig-Hoffman, also known as spinal muscular atrophy, which can result in problems moving, breathing and swallowing.

Most people with the disease die within the first few years of life, but he is among the 10 per cent who survive into adulthood.

With his condition worsening every day, he previously told the MailOnline that he wants the chance of having a new body before his disease kills him.

He claimed his family fully support his decision to be the first human to undergo such surgery and said: 'If you want something to be done, you need to participate in it.

'I do understand the risks of such surgery. They are multiple.

'We can't even imagine what exactly can go wrong. I'm afraid that I wouldn't live long enough to see it happen to someone else.'

The new body would come from a transplant donor who is classified brain dead but otherwise healthy.

Dr Canavero has named the procedure HEAVEN, which is an acronym for head anastomosis venture. Anastomosis involves the surgical connecting of two parts.

The cost of the 36-hour operation, which could only be performed in one of the world's most advanced operating theatres, has been estimated to cost £14 million.

And he insists all of the necessary techniques to transplant a head onto a donor body already exist.

Both donor and patient would have their head severed from their spinal cord at the same time, using an ultra-sharp blade to give a clean cut.

The patient's head would then be placed onto the donor's body and attached using what Dr Canavero calls his 'magic ingredient' - a glue-like substance called polyethylene glycol - to fuse the two ends of the spinal cord together.

The muscles and blood supply would be stitched up, before the patient is put into a coma for four weeks to stop them from moving while the head and body heal together.

When they wake the patient should be able to move, feel their face and even speak with the same voice.

Powerful immunosuppressant drugs should stop the new body from being rejected.

Critics say Dr Canavero has simplified the difficulties involved in reattaching a spinal cord and said his plans are 'pure fantasy'.

But if the operation is successful, the pioneering procedure could give new hope to thousands of paralysed and disabled people.

Mr Spiridonov, who is also a tech scientist, presented his autopilot wheelchair system at a press conference in Moscow.

His project - called Clever Chair - will improve the quality of life for people who can't walk.

But he said his project is aimed to help disabled people in the masses, and not just individual cases - unlike his surgeon's operation.

However, he hopes his project can complement Dr Canavero's procedure, he added: 'I want to help as many people as I can with the technologies that do not raise doubts and debates.'

Mr Spiridonov is also attempting to raise funds for the surgery himself - by selling souvenir mugs and t-shirts.

He has marketed a range of clocks, coaster and caps with the logo 'Desire for Life' and showing an image of his head on a healthy, muscular body.

The first monkey head transplant was performed 45 years ago and a basic operation on a mouse was carried out in China recently.

Dr Robert White transplanted the head of one monkey onto the body of another at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

The monkey died after eight days because the body rejected the head.

The monkey was unable to breathe on its own. The animal could not move because the spinal cord were not connected.

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World's first human head transplant patient awaiting new information

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Valery Spiridonov will undergo the first ever human head transplant The 31-year-old is wheelchair reliant due to a muscle-wasting disease Operation will allow him to walk for the first time in his adult life His pioneering procedure is expected to take place in December 2017 His surgeon - dubbed Dr Frankenstein will reveal more in September The terminally ill man who is set to become the world's first head transplant recipient says more details about his extraordinary surgery will be revealed next month.

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Nanobots in blood

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A robot controlled by a joystick has been used to operate inside of an eye for the first time to remove a membrane that had been growing at the back of Dr. Beaver's eye. The membrane had been blocking his central vision in his right eye.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddeZ1NNiOOc&app=desktop - 3D printing replacement organs for humans - The artificial kidney. A doctor gave a patient an artificial kidney with microchip filters and living kidney cells that will be powered by the patients own heart. 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddeZ1NNiOOc&app=desktop - 3D printing replacement organs for humans - The artificial kidney. A doctor gave a patient an artificial kidney with microchip filters and living kidney cells that will be powered by the patients own heart. 

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- Robot operates inside eye in world first.  This article is about a robot performing an eye procedure for the first time. the device used in this surgery is called via a joystick. Dr Beaver was the first to be performed on as he had a membrane growing at the back of his eye. He was delighted how the surgery worked.

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The past decade has brought us jaw-dropping insights about the hidden workings of our brains, in part thanks to a popular brain scan technique called fMRI. But a major new study has revealed that fMRI interpretation has a serious flaw, one that could mean that much of what we've learned about our brains this way might need a second look.

On TV and in movies, we've all seen doctors stick an X-ray up on the lightbox and play out a dramatic scene: "What's that dark spot, doctor?" "Hm..."

In reality, though, a modern medical scan contains so much data, no single pair of doctor's eyes could possibly interpret it. The brain scan known as fMRI, for functional magnetic resonance imaging, produces a massive data set that can only be understood by custom data analysis software. Armed with this analysis, neuroscientists have used the fMRI scan to produce a series of paradigm-shifting discoveries about our brains.

Now, an unsettling new report, which is causing waves in the neuroscience community, suggests that fMRI's custom software can be deeply flawed - calling into question many of the most exciting findings in recent neuroscience.

The problem researchers have uncovered is simple: the computer programs designed to sift through the images produced by fMRI scans have a tendency to suggest differences in brain activity where none exist. For instance, humans who are resting, not thinking about anything in particular, not doing anything interesting, can deliver spurious results of differences in brain activity. It's even been shown to indicate brain activity in a dead salmon, whose stilled brain lit up an MRI as if it were somehow still dreaming of a spawning run.

The report throws into question the results of some portion of the more than 40,000 studies that have been conducted using fMRI, studies that plumb the brainy depths of everything from free will to fear. And scientists are not quite sure how to recover.

"It's impossible to know how many fMRI studies are wrong, since we do not have access to the original data," says computer scientist Anders Eklund of Linkoping University in Sweden, who conducted the analysis.

How it should have worked: Start by signing up subjects. Scan their brains while they rest inside an MRI machine. Then scan their brains again when exposed to pictures of spiders, say. Those subjects who are afraid of spiders will have blood rush to those regions of the brain involved in thinking and feeling fear, because such thoughts or feelings are suspected to require more oxygen. With the help of a computer program, the MRI machine then registers differences in hemoglobin, the iron-rich molecule that makes blood red and carries oxygen from place to place. (That's the functional in fMRI.) The scan then looks at whether those hemoglobin molecules are still carrying oxygen to a given place in the brain, or not, based on how the molecules respond to the powerful magnetic fields. Scan enough brains and see how the fearful differ from the fearless, and perhaps you can identify the brain regions or structures associated with thinking or feeling fear.

That's the theory, anyway. In order to detect such differences in brain activity, it would be best to scan a large number of brains, but the difficulty and expense often make this impossible. A single MRI scan can cost around $2,600, according to a 2014 NerdWallet analysis. Further, the differences in the blood flow are often tiny. And then there's the fact that computer programs have to sift the through images of the 1,200 or so cubic centimeters of gelatinous tissue that make up each individual brain and compare them to others, a big data analysis challenge.

Eklund's report shows that the assumptions behind the main computer programs used to sift such big fMRI data have flaws, as turned up by nearly 3 million random evaluations of the resting brain scans of 499 volunteers from Cambridge, Massachusetts; Beijing; and Oulu, Finland. One program turned out to have a 15-year-old coding error (which has now been fixed) that caused it to detect too much brain activity. This highlights the challenge of researchers working with computer code that they are not capable of checking themselves, a challenge not confined just to neuroscience.

The brain is even more complicated than we thought. Worse, Eklund and his colleagues found that all the programs assume that brains at rest have the same response to the jet-engine roar of the MRI machine itself as well as whatever random thoughts and feelings occur in the brain. Those assumptions appear to be wrong. The brain at rest is "actually a bit more complex," Eklund says.

More specifically, the white matter of the brain appears to be underrepresented in fMRI analyses while another specific part of the brain - the posterior cingulate, a region in the middle of the brain that connects to many other parts - shows up as a "hot spot" of activity. As a result, the programs are more likely to single it out as showing extra activity even when there is no difference. "The reason for this is still unknown," Eklund says.

Overall, the programs had a false positive rate - detecting a difference where none actually existed - of as much as 70 percent.

Unknown unknowns: This does not mean all fMRI studies are wrong. Co-author and statistician Thomas Nichols of the University of Warwick calculates that some 3,500 studies may be affected by such false positives, and such false positives can never be eliminated entirely. But a survey of 241 recent fMRI papers found 96 that could have even worse false-positive rates than those found in this analysis.

"The paper makes an important criticism," says Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at MIT (TED Talk: A neural portrait of the human mind), though she points out that it does not undermine those fMRI studies that do not rely on these computer programs.

Nonetheless, it is worrying. "I think the fallout has yet to be fully evaluated. It appears to apply to quite a few studies, certainly the studies done in a generic way that is the bread-and-butter of fMRI," says Douglas Greve, a neuroimaging specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. What's needed is more scrutiny, Greve suggests.

Another argument for open data. Eklund and his colleagues were only able to discover this methodological flaw thanks to the open sharing of group brain scan data by the 1,000 Functional Connectomes Project. Unfortunately, such sharing of brain scan data is more the exception than the norm, which hinders other researchers attempting to re-create the experiment and replicate the results. Such replication is a cornerstone of the scientific method, ensuring that findings are robust. Eklund, for one, therefore encourages neuroimagers to "share their fMRI data, so that other researchers can replicate their findings and re-analyze the data several years later." Only then can scientists be sure that the undiscovered activity of the human brain is truly revealed ... and that dead salmon are not still dreaming.

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Much of what we know about the brain may be wrong: The problem with fMRI

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On TV and in movies, we've all seen doctors stick an X-ray up on the lightbox and play out a dramatic scene: "What's that dark spot, doctor?" "Hm..." In reality, though, a modern medical scan contains so much data, no single pair of doctor's eyes could possibly interpret it.

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first person in the UK that is able to control his bionic arm using a mobile phone App

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Four young girls have made a game online to help prevent malaria. They have used technology to appeal to a younger audience in hopes to raise awareness on malaria.

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Malaria is treatable and preventable. And yet, the World Health Organization reports that almost half the world's population - 3.2 billion people - are still at risk of contracting the life-threatening disease.

At the Disrupt SF Hackathon, a group of teenage girls is gamifying malaria prevention to help halt the spread of the disease. They're Aruna Prasad, 16, Erin Smith, 16, Kathy Kong, 17, and Lillian Yuan, 17, and they've built Mapsquito, a game that educates players about malaria.

Mapsquito is built on top of Esri maps, and shows which countries around the world are affected by malaria. A player starts by clicking on a country where the disease is less prevalent (she advances to countries where the disease is more common as she progresses through the game).

"You see a stat about that country and malaria in that country," Prasad explains. Then, the player enters a Tetris-like environment, where icons representing mosquitos, mosquito netting, medicine and rainfall tumble from the top of the screen, and the player navigates from left to right, trying to catch the netting and medicine while avoiding the mosquitos and raindrops. The player begins with the same chance of malaria contraction as a citizen of the country that the level is based on. Her odds of survival increase and decrease as the player catches medicine or mosquitos.

"We want to educate people about what helps with malaria - what's good for it, what's bad for it - to increase awareness. Our ultimate goal is to get funding based on the level that people are able to reach in the game," Yuan tells TechCrunch. She envisions the game getting funding from an anti-malaria charity such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation so that, as players advance, money is donated to the countries represented in the game.

"In the game, you save the characters' lives by moving to the next level. If you save the character's life, you save a real person," Prasad says of how the game could partner with a charity.

The all-girl hacking team formed on Friday outside of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, where the girls had just finished participating in #BuiltByGirls, a pitch competition presented by Michelle Obama's Let Girls Learn initiative and AOL (the parent company of TechCrunch). "We were standing outside and thought, 'Let's be a team, guys,'" Prasad recalls.

The girls entered the Disrupt SF Hackathon and built a prototype of their game in just 24 hours. Smith said the game was inspired by Nothing But Nets, a United Nations Foundation that raises money to provide bed nets to people in countries affected by malaria. (The Golden State Warriors' Stephen Curry will be fundraising for Nothing But Nets at Disrupt SF on Tuesday.)

"We had heard about Nothing but Nets and were interested in what they're doing. Malaria is completely preventable and treatable but hasn't been prevented yet. It's a gap that cam be closed with awareness and funding," Smith says.

Kong says that her experiences at #BuiltByGirls and the Disrupt SF Hackathon have helped solidify her interest in going into the tech industry later in life.

"I was more business but I wanted to pursue technology. But my school didn't offer that. After being here, I'm pretty sure," Kong explains. She said that education is important for helping girls enter the industry. "My access is way better than girls in developing countries, but I would like my own access to be increased," she adds.

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Mapsquito is a game built by teenagers to fight malaria

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Malaria is treatable and preventable. And yet, the World Health Organization reports that almost half the world's population - 3.2 billion people - are still at risk of contracting the life-threatening disease. At the Disrupt SF Hackathon, a group of teenage girls is gamifying malaria prevention to help halt the spread of the disease.

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Eye surgery performed by a robot that is controlled by a joystick

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Surgeons have used a robot to operate inside the eye and restore sight - in a world first.

A team at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital used the device, controlled via a joystick, to remove a membrane one hundredth of a millimetre thick.

Patient Bill Beaver, 70, a curate in Oxford, said it was "a fairytale".

Surgeons hope the procedure will pave the way for more complex eye surgery than is currently possible with the human hand.

The BBC had exclusive access to the procedure.

'I can see'

Dr Beaver said: "It's almost the world of fairy tales but it's true. I'm just fortunate that I'm the first to have it."

Robot assisted surgery is commonplace, but until now had never been used inside the eye.

Prof Robert MacLaren from University of Oxford, who led the procedure, told me: "Operating at the back of the eye needs great precision, and the challenge has been to get a robot system to do that through a tiny hole in the wall of the eye without causing damage as it moves around.

"Most robots in theatre are big, with big engineering whereas this is tiny - everything had to be shrunk down."

The Preceyes surgical robot was developed by a Dutch company, a spin-out of Eindhoven University of Technology.

The surgeon uses a joystick and touch-screen to guide a thin needle into the eye, while monitoring its progress through a microscope.

The robot, which acts like a mechanical hand, has seven motors and is able to filter out hand tremors from the surgeon.

Large movements of the joystick result in tiny movements of the robot, and if the surgeon releases their grip any movement is frozen.

The patient

Dr Beaver was officiating chaplain to the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment until last year.

In July his optician spotted a membrane growing at the back of his right eye. The pressure had created a hole in his retina which was destroying his central vision.

Before his surgery said: "When I hold up a book, all I can see is mush in the centre, and my vision in that eye is restricted to the periphery."

He underwent the pioneering surgical technique at the end of August.

Prof MacLaren said: "Normally when we do this operation by hand we touch the retina and there is some haemorrhage, but when we used the robot the membrane was lifted cleanly away."

The result is that Dr Beaver's central vision in his right eye has been restored.

A gas bubble in the eye means he is currently short sighted, but normal distance vision will return in the coming months.

Dr Beaver said: "The degeneration in my vision was very scary and I was fearful I would lose my sight entirely - so for this intervention to take place so effortlessly is a real godsend."

Twelve patients will undergo surgical procedures using the robot, in a trial funded by the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre.

Additional funding is being provided by Zizoz, a Dutch charity for patients with choroideremia, a genetic form of blindness which might be a future target for treatment using the robot.

Another level

The trial is designed as a proof of principle, to establish whether the robot can do what an eye surgeon does, but with greater accuracy.

But the ultimate goal is for robotics to take eye surgery to another level.

Prof MacLaren said: "There is no doubt in my mind that we have just witnessed a vision of eye surgery in the future.

"We can certainly improve on current operations, but I hope the robot will allow us to do new more complex and delicate operations that are impossible with the human hand."

Oxford is among several centres around the world which are trialling retinal gene therapy - a new treatment to prevent blindness.

Currently this treatment is done by hand, and further interventions involving stem cell injections are planned which require cells to be slowly infused into the eye.

The robot should allow surgeons to inject cells under the retina over a period of 10 minutes, something which would be impossible with the human hand.

The Dutch company which developed the robot believes that it could eventually be used outside the operating theatre.

Maarten Beelen from Preceyes said: "In the future we could see this being used in an office based setting, where only the robot would touch the eye and it would be fully automated, which would improve efficiency and reduce costs."

The robot system is a prototype and as yet the company has not revealed what it will cost to purchase.

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Robot operates inside eye in world first

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Surgeons have used a robot to operate inside the eye and restore sight - in a world first. A team at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital used the device, controlled via a joystick, to remove a membrane one hundredth of a millimetre thick. Patient Bill Beaver, 70, a curate in Oxford, said it was "a fairytale".