THE PROJECT
OF COOPERATION IN THE FIELD
OF OPTICAL AND LASER NONINVASIVE
MEDICAL DIAGNOSTICS
(published in the "Laser-Inform" No. 23 (278) December 2003)
ABSTRACT
Analysis
of modern tendencies of diagnostics and treatment in medicine shows that today
in the overwhelming majority of cases those methods come to the first place that
minimize invasiveness, pharma-chemical and other ecologically and
psychologically undesirable effects on the patient’s organism. Besides that,
the increase in population and rate of illness throughout the world increases
the loading on the medical staff in clinics and puts in the forefront those
medical technologies that possess a maximum effect at a minimum waste of time.
These requirements are in full manner can be satisfied by the modern optical and
laser noninvasive clinical diagnostic methods that recently began to appear in
many leading countries all over the world, and, in that number, in Russia. Their
advantages are evident: the absence of harmful ionizing radiations and a pharma-chemical
effect on the organism, the absence of contraindications for the majority of
patients, non-invasiveness, antisepticity, high information, real time, etc.
Moreover, from the viewpoint of efficiency of financial investments these
methods completely can be defined as so-called breakthrough technologies that
are able to provide a rapid qualitative leap to a new technological level in one
or another field of medicine and/or industry with minimum financial expenses.
The
general laser (optical) noninvasive approach to a medical diagnostics is based
on a simple, obvious fact, that the optical properties of biological soft
tissues and liquids (skin, mucosa, blood, etc.) are functions of its
physiological, functional and pathophysiological condition (state). They are
different for normal and pathological cases, so there is a possibility to
determine a tissues’ and organs’ clinical state by means of illuminating
tissues by the light of different spectral waveband and measuring the spectral
tissues’ optical properties (absorbance, scattering, reflectance,
fluorescence, etc.) and its changing during a time. Basing on that it is
possible to register through the skin (or mucosa) a number of parameters of the
peripheral tissues’ blood microcirculation as well as to identify of different
destructive-inflammatory and tumour processes into the tissues and organs, to
calculate of relative contents of different fractions of the hemoglobin into the
peripheral blood, NADH or collagen/elastin content into the skin and many-many
other things. The
specialties of the optical waveband and high sensitivity of the modern optical
equipment allow to obtain a complex information without the use of any
conventional blood tests, tissue biopsy, what advantageously distinguish the
mentioned technique from all other conventional clinical diagnostic
technologies. Accordingly, the development of medical equipment for the
effective realization of optical noninvasive medical diagnostics is very
interesting, promising from the business point of view and up-to-date task.
Today a number of different optical and laser noninvasive clinical diagnostic methods are well known in the world: optical puls-oximetry, fluorescence diagnostics, absorption spectroscopy, laser Doppler flowmetry, etc. A number of noninvasive optical diagnostic apparatus are already widely presented on the international medical equipment’s market (puls-oximetry or laser Doppler flowmetry systems, for example). Another series of apparatus are now on a finish stage of the way to the market (fluorescence biopsy systems, for instance). In our country today there aren't any serious professional companies or special departments in big production companies which would be oriented to develop and produce the professional optical noninvasive medical diagnostic systems and apparatus. Moreover, this problem needs not only an industrial possibility to produce a hardware for such diagnostic equipment, but also a lot of additional work concerning a medical research and a clinical testing, a development an effective medical diagnostic algorithms in real different clinical cases, a development an effective software for diagnostic data processing, and so on. That is why there is an interesting, promising and up-to-date task to create a wide cooperation of different industrial, medical and scientific companies and institutions for the goal of development, design and production a wide range of medical noninvasive optical diagnostic equipment, methods and systems.
As we hope and are planning today, in our cooperation there will have place a production platform of the State R&D Institute "POLYUS" and of the Federal State Production Corporation "ISTOK", a medical research platform of Moscow Regional Research and Clinical Institute "MONIKI", a general scientific and research platform of the General Physics Institute of Russian Science Academy and Medical Engineering Research Institute "VNIIMP-VITA" of Russian Academy of Medical Science, an educational platform of Moscow State Institute of Electronics & Mathematics and some other technical, medical and scientific platforms. Our laboratory "NII-R2" having a different specialists form doctors to engineers would play a role of a Head Corporative Scientific Company to organize and coordinate all this process from the scientific research to a production programme.
We call today for a domestic and foreign collaborators for our project. We need to extend our production platform and our medical research and testing platforms. Especially we are looking for a Strategic financial partners and investors for our project, a State financial support for our production programme, a trade (commercial) collaborators for the market output. Our project is already supported by the Laser Association of Russia and by a number of small private business structures. If you are interesting in this area of research, development, medicine and industry then don't hesitate to contact us at any time (see e-mail address in Collaboration)!