Singapore national eye center

The Singapore National Eye Centre (SNEC) last week invited journalists from Indonesia, including Vincent Lingga from The Jakarta Post, for a two day visit and briefing from its renowned ophthalmologists. His report: We happened to bump into Winawati Sutisna from Jakarta who was on a visit to the International Patient Service department at the SNEC to consult with an ophthalmologist about treatment for her 10-year old daughter’s strabismus, or squint-eye. “I learnt from an ophthalmologist in Jakarta that the SNEC is the best place in the region to treat my daughter’s problem,” Winawati said. She paid S$90 (US$72.30) for a consultation which she said was not much more than the fees charged by a senior ophthalmologist at a modern private eye hospital in Jakarta. Winawati is just one of the tens of thousands of Indonesians seeking quality healthcare or simply having health checkups at government or private hospitals in Singapore. The latest data from the health ministry shows that last year around 18,000 visitors from Indonesia went to Singapore for medical attention. That’s almost 50 percent of the total number of foreigners who travel to there for health services. The Indonesian government has been trying to encourage private investment in healthcare, allowing foreigners to hold up to 100 percent equity in private hospitals in the hope that an increased foreign presence will motivate state hospitals to improve their services.

Despite this expansion, Indonesians who can afford it prefer to go abroad. They are the major contributors to medical tourism in neighboring countries, notably Singapore and Malaysia According to the Mayapada Health Care group, Indonesians spend more than US$750 million annually to travel to Singapore, Malaysia or Australia for medical purposes. As the most modern, well-equipped specialist in eye care in the region, the SNEC has become increasingly popular for Indonesians from cities other than Jakarta, which do not have modern eye hospitals. Since its opening in 1990, the center has steadily expanded and now covers nine subspecialties: in cataract and comprehensive ophthalmology; corneal and external eye disease; glaucoma; immunology and vitreo-; neuro-ophthalmology; ocular inflammation; oculoplastic and aesthetic eyeplastic; paediatric ophthalmology and strabismus; and refractive surgery. Last year alone, the SNEC managed 275,000 outpatient visits, 20,000 surgeries and more than 13,000 laser procedures. Doctor Ho Ching Lin, head of the glaucoma department at the SNEC, said as the local and regional referral center for secondary and tertiary management of glaucoma, her department manages more than 40,000 glaucoma attendances annually. “About 2,000 of them are visitors from Southeast Asia, including Indonesia,” Ho added. SNEC Medical Director Donald Tan, however, did not see the increasing popularity of his center as a zero-sum game with eye care hospitals or clinics in Indonesia. “The SNEC complements eye hospitals in Indonesia. We are actively involved in clinical trials and research into the causes and treatment of major eye conditions such as myopia and glaucoma. “Thousands of ophthalmologists from the region, including Indonesia, have participated in SNEC courses and meetings, which are organized annually,” added Tan, who last year was elected as first non-American president of the US-based Cornea Society. “I myself and several senior ophthalmologists from the SNEC have visited Indonesia often for lectures or conferences with Indonesian eye specialists. We also cooperate with several eye hospitals in Indonesia like the Jakarta Eye Center and the National Eye Center in Cicendo, Bandung,” Tan said. SNEC ophthalmologists and eye specialists from the region regularly exchange views and best practices through the annual meetings of the Asian Association of Eye Hospitals. The best competitive advantage of SNEC has is the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI), one of the largest eye and vision research institutes in the Asia Pacific region in terms of staff numbers, grant income, research initiatives and innovations and inventions. SERI director Wong Tien Yin said the multi-ethnic composition of the Singapore population is really an advantage because therapies and diagnoses that have been developed in the West may not be directly applicable to Asia. “Its ability to test diagnostics and therapeutics with patients of three major ethnic groups positions makes SERI the eye laboratory for the whole Asian market,” Wong added Research at SERI, which is attached to the SNEC complex, has helped the SNEC develop and apply new eye care services, for example, Lasik, a wonders of modern medicine and technology to improve vision and do away with spectacles or contact lenses. Cataract extraction and intraocular lens implantation is the most common operation performed at the SNEC with more than 10,000 cataract procedures each year, by a team of over 55 full time ophthalmology specialists. “Those who plan to have laser vision correction can now look forward to a new technique beyond LASIK, with the introduction of SNEC ReLEx,” said Cordelia Chan, head of the refractive surgery service. Chan explained that unlike conventional LASIK which destroys the inner corneal tissues, the new procedure does not create a flap in the cornea and uses only one laser for the entire process, thereby resulting in a much stronger eye and less immediate postoperative discomfort and tearing. Tan and his team have developed and patented a new technique for cornea transplants, which used to require at least 20 stitches and a recovery of six months. The new technique, called DMEK, already used worldwide, minimizes invasive corneal transplantation, thereby reducing damage to the new cornea’s cell.

An increasing number of middleclass and high-income Indonesians, especially those in the resource-rich provinces with direct flights to Singapore, look for quality healthcare in the city state, well known as providing the best healthcare center in Southeast Asia.

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Le botz 6.6 free download

Maybe if you want to do'' cheating'' by autoplay, you can use the le bot. But because le bot you might have dispensed confused. But you do not need to be confused anymore because le bot 6.6 version has come out. More Advanced, More Cool, More simple (maybe).

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Bionic Hand

PART 3

A history of body-restoration attempts, in the form of man-made hands and legs and feet, lines the selves in Robert Lipschutz's office at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC). "The basic technology of prosthetic arms hasn't changed much in the last hundred years, "he says. "Materials are different, so we use plastic instead of leather, butthe basic idea has been the same : hooks and hinges moved by cables or motors, controlled by levels. A lot of amputees coming back from Iraq get devices like these. Here, try this on, "Lipschutz drags a plastic shell off one of this shelves.

It turns out to be a left shoulder and arm. The shoulders part is a kind breastplate, secured scross the chest by a harness. The arm, hinged at the shoulder and elbow, ends in a metal pincer. To extend the arm, you twist your head to the left and press a lever with your chin, and use a little body English to swing the limb out. It is as awkward as it sounds. And hevy. After 20 minutes your neck hurts from the odd posture and the effort of pressing the levers. Many amputees end up putting such arms aside.

"It's hard for me to give people these devices sometimes," Lipschutz says, "because we just don't know if they will really help."What could help more, he and others at RIC think, is the kind prosthesis Amanda Kitts has volunteered to test-one controlled byte brain, not by body parts that normally have nothing to do with moving the hand. A technique called targeted muscle re-innervation uses nerves remaining after an amputation to control an artificial limb. It was first tried in a patient in 2002. Four years later Tommy Kitts, Amanda's husband, read about it on the Internet as his wife lay in a hospital bed after her accident. The truck that had crushed her car had also crushes her arm, from just above the elbow down.

"I was angry, sad, depressed. I just couldn't accept it, "she says. But what Tommy told her about the Chicago arm sounded hopeful. "It seemed like the best option out there, a lot better than motors and switches, "Tommy says. "Amanda actually got excited about it, "Soon they were on a plane to Illinois.

Todd Kiken, a physician and bio-medical engineer at RIC,was the person responsible for what the institute had begun calling the "bionic arm." He knew that nerves in a amputee's stump could still carry signals from the brain. And he knew that a computer in a prosthesis could direct electric motors to move the limb. The problemwas making the connection. Nerves conduct electricity, but they can;t be spliced together with a computer cable. (Nerve fibers and metal wires don't get along well.And an open wound where a wire enters the body would be a dangerous avenue for infections.)


to be continued

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Bionic Hand

PART 4

Kuiken need an amplifier to boost the signals form the nerves, avoiding the need for a direct splice. He found one in muscle. When muscles contract, they give off an electrical brust strong enough to be detected a technique to reroute severed nerves from their old, damaged spots to other muscles that could give their signals the proper boost.

Bionic woman Kitts imagines a hand movement, and muscle activity in her residual arm-decoded by a computer on her back causes the actual motion. When she straps on the actual motion. When she staps on the experimental Johns Hopkins-developed arm at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, she says, "often it feels like I'm not missing anything."

In October 2006 Kuiken set about rewiring Amanda Kitts. The first step was to salvage major nerves that once went all the way down her arm. "These are the same nerves that work the arm and hand, but we had to create four different muscle areas to lead them to, "Kuiken says. The nerves started in Kitts's brain, in the motor cortex, which holds a rough map of the body, but they stopped at the end of her stump-the disconnected telephone wires. In an intricate operation, a surgeon rerouted those nerves to different regions of Kitts's upper-arm muscles. For months the nerves grew, millimeter by millimeter, moving deeper into their new homes.

"At three months I started feeling little tingles and twitches," says Kitts. "By four months I could actually feel different places and feel different fingers." What she was feeling were part of the phantom arm that were mapped into her brain, now reconnected to flesh. When Kitts thought about moving those phantom fingers, her real upper-arm arm muscles contracted.

A month later she was fitted with her first bionic arm, which had electrodes in the cup around the stump to pick up the signals from the muscles. Now the challenge was to convert those signals into commands to move the elbow and hand.

"Now I'm able to see silhouettes of trees again," says Jo Ann Lewis. "That's oneof the last things I remeber seeing naturally. Today I can see limbs sticking out this way and hat."

A storm of electrical noise was coming from the small region on Kitts's arm. Somewhere in there was the signal that meant "straighten the elbow" or "turn the wrist." A microprocessor housed in the prosthesis had to be programmed to fish out the right signal and send it to the right motor.

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Bionic Hand

PART 2

Kitts is living proff that, even though the flash and bone may be damaged or gone, the nerves and parts of the brain that once controlled it live on. In many patients, they sit there waiting to communicate-dangling telephone wires, severed from a handset. With microscopic electrodes and surgical wizardry  doctors have begun to connect these parts in other patients to devices such as cameras and microphones and motors. As a result, the blind can see, the deaf can hear, and Amanda Kitts can fold her shirts.

Kitts is one of "tomorrow's people", a group whose missing or ruined body parts are being replaced by devices embedded in their nervous systems that respond to commands from their brains. The  machines they use are called neural prostheses or-as scientists have become more comfortable with a arm made popular by science fiction writers- bionics. Eric Schremp, who has been a quadriplegic since he shattered his neck during swimming pool dive in 1992, now has an electronic device under his skin that mind and machine an array of sensors tracks muscle movements that Amanda Kitts produces in her residual arm thanks to surgically rerouted nerves. Next generation prostheses obey relayed signals, increasingly working like her original limb. Lets him move his fingers to grip s fork. Jo Ann Lewis, a blind woman, can see the shapes of trees with the help of a tiny camera that communicates with the her optic nerve. And Tammy Kenny cans peak to her 18-month-old son, Aiden,and he can reply, because the boy, born deaf, has 22 electrodes inside his ear that change sounds picked up by a microphone into signals his auditory nerve can understand.

The work is extremely delicate, a series of trials fills with many errors. As scientists have learned that it's possible to link machine and mind, they have also learned how difficult it so to maintain that connection. If the cup atop Kitts arm shifts just slightly, for instance, she might not be able to close her fingers. Still, bionics represents a big leap forward, enabling researchers when Kitts thinks about flexing her elbow, the phantom moves, and the artificial elbow bends. "I don't really think about it. I just move it, "she says. To give people back much moreof what they've lost than was ever possible before.

"That's rally what this work is about : restoration," says Joseph Pancrazio, program director for neural engineering at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "When a person with a spinal-cord injury can be in a restaurant, feeding himself, and no one else notices, that is my definition of success."

to be continued ......

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Bionic Hand

Amanda Kitts is mobbed by four and five year old as she enters the classroom at the Kiddie Kotage Learning Center near Knoxville, Tennessee. "Hey kids, how're my babies today?" she say, patting shoulders and ruffling hair. Slender and energetic, she has operated this day care center and two others for almost 20 years. She crouches down to talk to a small girl, putting her hands on her knees. "The robot arm!" several kids cry. "You remember this, huh?" says Kitts, holding out her left arm. She turns her hand palm up. There is a soft whirring sound. If you weren't paying close attention, you'd miss it. She bends her elbow, accompanied by more whirring. "Make it do something silly!" one girl says. "Silly?" Remember how I can shake your hand?" Kitts says, extending her arm and rotating her wrist. A boy reaches out, hesitantly, to touch her finger. What be brushes against is flesh-colored plastic, finger curved slightly inward. Underneath are three motors, a metal frame, and a network of sophisticated electronics. The assembly is topped by a white plastic cup midway up Kitt's biceps  encircling a stump that is almost all that remains from the arm she lost in a car accident in 2006.

Almost all, but not quite. Within her brain, below the level of consciousness, lives an in tact image of that arm, a phantom. When Kitts thinks about flexing her elbow, the phantom moves. Impulses racing down from her brain are picked up by electrode sensors in the white cup and converted into signals that turn motors, and the artificial elbow bends.

"I don't really think about it. I just move it", says the 40-year-old, who uses both this standard model and a more experimental arm with even more control. "After my accident I felt lost, and I didn't understand why God would do such a terrible thing to me. These days I'm just excitedall the time, because they keep on improving the arm. One day I'LL be able to feel things with it and clap my hands togetherin time to the songs my kids are singing

to be continued ......

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bionic hand

Amanda Kitts tests a bionic arm in the prosthetics lab at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

Four years ago an automobile accident robbed Amanda Kitts of her arm and the ability to do things most of us take for granted, like making a sandwich. "I felt lost," the teacher from knoxville, Tennessee, tells writer Josh Fuschman in this month's cover story on bionics.

Then Amanda met Todd Kuiken, a physician and bio medical engineer who knew that the nerves in an amputee's stump can still telegraph brain signals. He fitted her with a bionic arm.

Bionics is technology at its most ingenious and human  Most of us first encountered the word in science fiction books or television show a like the Six Millo in Dollar ,an. In that 1970s series, pilot Steve Austin is injured in a crash. His rebuilt body, which includes a bionic arm, eye and legs, is nothing short of superhuman. But the bionics of modern medical engineering has little to do with enabling someone to run at 60 milesan hour or use an eye like a zoom lens. It is more about the quiet miracle of holding a fork or seeing the silhouette of a tree. It's about allowing people like Amanda to reclaim what they've lost.

A year ago Ray Edwards, a quadruple amputee, was one of the first people in the United Kingdom to be fitted with a bionic hand. When he fixed his new hand for the restoration of one's normal self is a powerful gift.

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Mummies Bare All

The plump neck on mummy Meresamun (right) made scientists think she had a goiter. Then they examined her with a high resolution computed tomogrraphy (CT) scan and learned the truth : Her mummifiers had inserted a bit of stuffing to enlarge the the ban priestess' neck.

Opening a sealed sarcophagus can destroy the mummy inside. but medical technologies allow experts to peer in without risk. X rays have long been used for this purpose, though results aren't always reliable. CT scans, now so powerful they can reveal 3 D slices half a millimeter thick, are clearing up years of uncertainty. Scientists have been able to pinpoint mummies' ages at death and see how statues result in higher quantity mummification. Medical imaging has tuned up evidence of an ancient gallstone (once thought to be a scarab), cancer, even teeth grinding.

Nothing was as surprising as the outcome of the high teach analysis of a 2,700 year old mummy from the Brooklyn Museum. "You told me this one was a woman!" the radiologist University Hospital said. Just like that, the mummy known for 80-plus years are the Lady Hor became a sir -Hannah Bloch

Inside the coffin
thirty billion CT measurements are uncovering details about the priestess Meresamun (right), who died around age in 800 B.C

No Cavities
A CT scan showed cavity free teeth.Stones or faience pieces cover her eyes.

Childbearing Hips ?
Scan results are inconclusive as to whether she had children.

Good legs
Strong bones are evidences of her healthy diet and active lifestyle.

Foot Trouble
A 2,800 year old bunion showed up her right big toe.

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Benefit of technology

Do we have the wisdom to match our technology?

In my opinion technology is simply the evolution of an idea and is only limited by human creativity. Peter Schwartz, Futurist, reveals where the most important changes will take place and how we will become masters of our own evolution.

As technology evolves, we will witness a healthier and greener future a biological future. We must save our world with technology, don't let technology harm our wold, and we must anticipate in the future use technology. We must be smart to use technology and know about consequence which posed by this technology. Through synthetic biology, foe example, we can modify bacteria to do what we want not what nature wants. Take e-coli. We can turn its waste product into an anti potentially, that waste could even also become diesel fuel. One day, biology will produce hydrocarbon fuels without any CO2 in the process.

As for medicine, it will no longer be about surgery but about natural healing processes. A patient needing a new heart will simply  have one grown for them using their own heart tissue. We will also be close to finding cures for major diseases and living past one hundred could become the norm.

Through such innovation, we will solve many critical issues and transform life for the better. We will move from an age of discovery to an age of mastery.

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