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White Papers: Medical
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What Every Medical Pumps Engineer Should Know About Sensors
This application paper explores the role of sensors in medical pump design. It covers how force, bubble, and temperature sensors help improve safety, accuracy, and...

White Papers: Electronics & Computers
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The Role of Single Board Computers in Advancing Medical Technology
In the evolving world of healthcare, medical devices require compact, powerful computing solutions to support critical applications like robotic surgery, diagnostic imaging, and...

Briefs: Medical
NASA’s Langley Research Center has developed ZONE, an innovative method for improving athletes’ responses to stress, anxiety, and loss of...
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Briefs: Medical
NASA has developed a novel technology strategy called “The NASA Analyzer” that would provide comprehensive in-flight medical diagnostic capability in a compact, handheld device for human deep-space...
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Briefs: Medical
This technology is a device that uses electrical activity to facilitate the wound healing process while protecting the wound. The bandage is made of an electroactive material (see figure) that is stimulated...
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Briefs: Medical
Fluid Preservation System (FPS)
Biological samples contain labile molecules that deteriorate rapidly ex-vivo. Terrestrially, biological samples are preserved either by freezing them (–80 °C) or by including preservation chemicals. While chemical preservation may be ideal for certain molecules, their functionality is selective and can, while...
Briefs: Medical
Intranasal Scopolamine — INSCOP
Space motion sickness (SMS) commonly experienced by astronauts during a space mission often requires treatment with medication. However, exposure to a microgravity environment results in a myriad of physiological changes that alter bioavailability. In particular, studies indicate that the bioavailability of oral...
Briefs: Medical
Gene Expression Signatures for Colon Carcinogenesis and Radiation-Induced Cellular Transformation
Monitoring colon health and transformation into a diseased tissue, including inflammation and cancer, is difficult using conventional techniques, as individuals are required to undergo invasive procedures. However, by using exfoliated cells, it is...
Briefs: Medical
Method and Apparatus for Automated Isolation of Nucleic Acids from Small Cell Samples
RNA isolation is a ubiquitous need, driven by current emphasis on micro-arrays and miniaturization. With commercial systems requiring 100,000 to 1,000,000 cells for successful isolation, there is a growing need for a small-footprint, easy-to-use device that can...
Briefs: Medical
A Novel Protocol for Decoating and Permeabilizing Bacterial Spores for Epifluorescent Microscopy
Based on previously reported procedures for permeabilizing vegetative bacterial cells, and numerous trial-and-error attempts with bacterial endospores, a protocol was developed for effectively permeabilizing bacterial spores, which facilitated the...
Briefs: Medical
Various machines have been developed to address the need for countermeasures of bone and muscle deterioration when humans operate over extended time in space. Even though these...
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Briefs: Medical
FRET-Aptamer Assays for Bone Marker Assessment, C-Telopeptide, Creatinine, and Vitamin D
Astronauts lose 1.0 to 1.5% of their bone mass per month on long-duration spaceflights. NASA wishes to monitor the bone loss onboard spacecraft to develop nutritional and exercise countermeasures, and make adjustments during long space missions. On Earth, the...
Briefs: Medical
Sterile delivery devices can be created by integrating a medicine delivery instrument with surfaces that are coated with germicidal and anti-fouling material. This requires...
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Briefs: Medical
An improved method for culturing immature muscle cells (myoblasts) into a mature skeletal muscle overcomes some of the notable limitations of prior culture methods. The...
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Briefs: Medical
Extreme Ionizing-Radiation-Resistant Bacterium
There is a growing concern that desiccation and extreme radiation-resistant, non-spore-forming microorganisms associated with spacecraft surfaces can withstand space environmental conditions and subsequent proliferation on another solar body. Such forward contamination would jeopardize future life...
Briefs: Medical
Developing Physiologic Models for Emergency Medical Procedures Under Microgravity
Several technological enhancements have been made to METI’s commercial Emergency Care Simulator (ECS) with regard to how microgravity affects human physiology. The ECS uses both a software only lung simulation, and an integrated mannequin lung that uses a physical...
Briefs: Medical
Beat-to-Beat Blood Pressure Monitor
This device provides non-invasive beat-to-beat blood pressure measurements and can be worn over the upper arm for prolonged durations. Phase and waveform analyses are performed on filtered proximal and distal photoplethysmographic (PPG) waveforms obtained from the brachial artery. The phase analysis is used...
Briefs: Medical
Improving Balance Function Using Low Levels of Electrical Stimulation of the Balance Organs
Crewmembers returning from long duration space flight face significant challenges due to the microgravity induced inappropriate adaptations in balance/sensorimotor function. The Neuroscience Laboratory at JSC is developing a method based on stochastic...
Briefs: Imaging
Hands-Free Transcranial Color Doppler Probe
Current transcranial color Doppler (TCD) transducer probes are bulky and difficult to move in tiny increments to search and optimize TCD signals. This invention provides miniature motions of a TCD transducer probe to optimize TCD signals.
Briefs: Medical
PMA-Linked Fluorescence for Rapid Detection of Viable Bacterial Endospores
The most common approach for assessing the abundance of viable bacterial endospores is the culture-based plating method. However, culture-based approaches are heavily biased and oftentimes incompatible with upstream sample processing strategies, which make viable...
Briefs: Medical
The objective of this research was to design, build, and test an experimental apparatus for studying the parameters of atmospheric entry heating, and...
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Briefs: Medical
A nanovector multistage system has been created to overcome or bypass sequential barriers within the human body, in order to deliver a therapeutic or imaging...
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Briefs: Medical
Dramatic improvements have been made in NASA’s Whole Blood Staining Device (WBSD) since it was last described in “Whole-Blood- Staining Device,” (MSC-22614) NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 23, No. 10 (October...
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Briefs: Medical
The rHEALTH technology is designed to shrink an entire hospital testing laboratory onto a handheld device. A physician or healthcare provider performs the test by collecting a fingerstick of blood from a...
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Briefs: Medical
Radiation Protection Using Single-Wall Carbon Nanotube Derivatives
This invention is a means of radiation protection, or cellular oxidative stress mitigation, via a sequence of quenching radical species using nano-engineered scaffolds, specifically single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and their derivatives. The material can be used as a means of...
Briefs: Medical
PMA-PhyloChip DNA Microarray To Elucidate Viable Microbial Community Structure
Since the Viking missions in the mid- 1970s, traditional culture-based methods have been used for microbial enumeration by various NASA programs. Viable microbes are of particular concern for spacecraft cleanliness, for forward contamination of extraterrestrial bodies...
Briefs: Medical
Improved Devices for Collecting Sweat for Chemical Analysis
Improved devices have been proposed for collecting sweat for biochemical analysis — especially for determination of the concentration of Ca2+ ions in sweat as a measure of loss of Ca from bones. Unlike commercially available sweat-collection patches used previously in monitoring...
Briefs: Medical
Cytometer on a Chip
A cytometer now under development exploits spatial sorting of sampled cells on a microarray chip followed by use of grating-coupled surface-plasmon-resonance imaging (GCSPRI) to detect the sorted cells. This cytometer on a chip is a prototype of contemplated future miniature cytometers that would be suitable for rapidly...
Briefs: Medical
Tissue Photolithography
Tissue lithography will enable physicians and researchers to obtain macromolecules with high purity (>90 percent) from desired cells in conventionally processed, clinical tissues by simply annotating the desired cells on a computer screen. After identifying the desired cells, a suitable lithography mask will be generated t...

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