RFID Tags May Keep Surgery Sponges Out of Patients
Posted on: Wednesday, 19 July 2006, 12:01 CDT
Radio frequency ID chips may be able to prevent surgical sponges being left inside patients, a study from the Stanford Medical School has revealed.
The study involved embedding RFID chips in sponges, which were then left inside a temporarily closed surgical site. The chips beeped when the surgeon waved a detector wand over the site. The devices were found to be 100% effective, activating within three seconds on average.
In the US, sponges and foreign objects are left in patients during open cavity operations once in every 10,000 procedures. Further research is required to determine whether the tags will be cost-effective, and form a better system than the manual before-and-after counting strategy conducted by operating staff at most hospitals.
Dr A. Macario, the physician who led the study, says that in the future a combination of RFID tags and other techniques including manual counting will be used. "We need a system that is really fail-safe where regardless of how people use a counting system technology, the patient doesn't leave the operating room with a retained foreign body."
Source: Datamonitor
Related Articles
- VA San Antonio Becomes the Second VA Nationally to Adopt the Safety-Sponge(TM) System
- Unigen Introduces Industry's Smallest Footprint Wireless Modules Built Around Cypress's 2.4-GHz WirelessUSB(TM) LP Radio System-On-A-Chip
- AMCC Delivers Highly Integrated, Security-Enabled System-on-Chip, Offering Low-Power and Low-Cost Benefits to Customers
- INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center Deploys the Safety-Sponge(TM) System Technology Across All Operating Rooms; Surgicount Medical Receives a Three-Year Contract From Leading Mid-West Hospital
- Cypress Delivers Programmable System-on-Chip(TM) (PSoC(TM)) With Integrated Full-Speed USB
- TDK Semiconductor Introduces World's First True Industrial Power Meter System-on-Chip
- Freescale Semiconductor Unveils Industry's First Broadband Passive Optical Networking System-on-Chip
- TI Delivers Industry's Best Performance and Value for a Precision Data Acquisition System-on-a-Chip
- Registration Opens for the 1st International System-on-Chip Conference, Newport Beach, California
- MediaWorks, a Fabless Semiconductor Company, Launches with the Highest Integrated System-on-a-Chip for Solid State Camcorders
 |
 |
User Comments (0)
RSS Feeds