First interactive medical iPad iBook arrives in Apple’s bookstore, free to download

When Apple announced iBooks 2 and iBooks author, there was much excitement amongst the medical tech community about the possibility of physicians creating their own interactive textbooks.  Last Friday saw the release of the first interactive medical textbook, created by Dr. Ed Wallitt, Founder of Podmedics.com.

We recently reviewed PodMedics, a UK based site which offers a range of medical podcasts for medical students and junior doctors alike.  The iBook entitled, The Podmedics Do Surgery, is a free medical textbook designed for medical students. It combines text, interactive images, video lectures and questions in one place and is a first for medical education. iMedicalApps

DePuy Announces The Launch of Several New Products at this Year’s AAOS Meeting

DePuy had some ... announcements for new additions to many of their product lines at last week’s annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgery (AAOS). The new launches includes the new AOX Polyethylene, an anti-oxidant polyethylene liner for knee replacements, RECLAIM and GRIPTION TF, new systems for revision hip replacements, TRUMATCH, and a personalized knee replacement system and GLOBAL UNITE and GLOBAL STEPTECH, new solutions for shoulder replacement and fractures. MedGadget

Orthopaedic smart device provides personalized medicine

Imagine a smart sensor customized to provide vital, real-time information about a patient's recent orthopaedic surgery. Instead of relying on X-rays or invasive procedures, surgeons will be able to collect diagnostic data from an implantable sensor. A study presented at the Orthopaedic Research Society 2012 Annual Meeting in San Francisco outlined this remarkable technology that promises to make post-surgical diagnosis and follow up more precise, efficient, and cost-effective.

"The sensor provides opportunities to make specific and detailed diagnostics for a particular patient and to tailor care based on very objective and quantitative measures," said Eric H. Ledet, PhD, Assistant Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Eurekalert!

Conventional thought on ACL injury mechanism challenged

Landing from a jump can cause a non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. But evidence presented at the Orthopaedic Research Society 2012 Annual Meeting demonstrates that the injury mechanism that causes that ACL injury involves a combination of factors rather than a single factor as some have claimed. Many hold the view that an athlete ruptures the ACL via a single plane motion -- the tibia moving forward due to a large quadriceps contraction.

According to Timothy E. Hewett, PhD, FACSM, Director of Research, Ohio State University Sports Health and Performance Institute and Cincinnati Children's Sports Medicine Biodynamics Center, that injury occurs due to a tri-planar multi-dimensional combination of factors. "Sometimes in science we have a lot of clinical expertise and a lot of engineering expertise but we don't have much—what I call--'common sense-pertise'."  Eurekalert!

Building bone from cartilage

A person has a tumor removed from her femur. A soldier is struck by an improvised explosive device and loses a portion of his tibia. A child undergoes chemotherapy for osteosarcoma but part of the bone dies as a result.

Every year, millions of Americans sustain fractures that don't heal or lose bone that isn't successfully grafted. But a study presented at the Orthopaedic Research Society (ORS) 2012 Annual Meeting in San Francisco offers new hope for those who sustain these traumas. Eurekalert!

Supraspinatus tendon tears at 3.0 T shoulder MR arthrography: diagnosis with 3D isotropic turbo spin-echo SPACE sequence versus 2D conventional sequences

Compared with 2D conventional sequences, MR arthrography using 3D TSE-SPACE was comparable for diagnosing supraspinatus tendon tears despite limitations in detecting small partial-thickness tears and in discriminating between full-thickness and deep partial-thickness tears. Jung JY, Jee WH, Park MY, Lee SY, Kim YS. Skeletal Radiol. 2012 Feb 10. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 22322904

Magnetic resonance imaging of acute patellar dislocation in children: patterns of injury and risk factors for recurrence.

Acute patellar dislocations remain a common injury in pediatric patients. The pattern of injury to the MPFL and VMO on MRI has not been described in a pediatric population. The triad of injury to the MPFL, VMO, and chondral surfaces should be recognized and understood, particularly when surgical reconstruction is necessary. Seeley M, Bowman KF, Walsh C, Sabb BJ, Vanderhave KL. J Pediatr Orthop. 2012 Mar;32(2):145-55. PMID: 22327448

Neuron memory key to taming chronic pain

“Perhaps the best example of a pain memory trace is found with phantom limb pain,” suggests Coderre. “Patients may have a limb amputated because of gangrene, and because the limb was painful before it was amputated, even though the limb is gone, the patients continue to feel they are suffering from pain in the absent limb. That’s because the brain remembers the pain. In fact, there’s evidence that any pain that lasts more than a few minutes will leave a trace in the nervous system.” It’s this memory of pain, which exists at the neuronal level, that is critical to the development of chronic pain. But until now, it was not known how these pain memories were stored at the level of the neurons.

Recent work has shown that the protein kinase PKMzeta plays a crucial role in building and maintaining memory by strengthening the connections between neurons. Now Coderre and his colleagues have discovered that PKMzeta is also the key to understanding how the memory of pain is stored in the neurons. They were able to show that after painful stimulation, the level of PKMzeta increases persistently in the central nervous system (CNS).

Even more importantly, the researchers found that by blocking the activity of PKMzeta at the neuronal level, they could reverse the hypersensitivity to pain that neurons developed after irritating the skin by applying capsaicin – the active ingredient in hot peppers. Moreover, erasing this pain memory trace was found to reduce both persistent pain and heightened sensitivity to touch. McGill