Technology-based Medicine
Our new approach to the treatment of septicemia (sepsis) does not use any pharmaceutical material, such as an antibiotic.
The technology required for this process is similar in complexity to an ink jet printer and is based on:
-current semiconductor and compuer manufacturing technology,and
-presently available high speed data processing technology.
At a high level, this approach comprises removing blood from the patient, processing this blood to kill the pathogen cells, and then returning the processed blood to the patient.
New Treatment Process
Image
A lenseless digital picture is produced for a small volume of patient blood. This picture has images of cells present in the blood. These cells have dimensions on the order of microns.
Red blood cells (erythrocytes) are approximate 6 microns in diameter and pathogen cells, such as E. coli, have dimensions of .5 to 3 microns.
Current semiconductor technology can fabricate structures as small as .01 microns, therefore integrated circuit structures to produce images on this scale can be manufactured.
Recognize
After the digital picture, which includes the images of cells in the blood, is produced pattern recognition is used to identify and locate the pathogen cells, such as E. coli. This digital processing utilizes a reference file of cell images to perform the pattern recognition.
Although one picture of imaged blood may contain billions of bits of data, current data processing technology has the capability of performing the pattern recognition in a short period of time.
Destroy
Once the pathogen cells have been located, energy is applied individually to the identified cells to destroy them. This energy can be in the form of ultraviolet light, an electric field, an electric current, or heat, all of which are well known for destroying pathogen bacteria cells.
An alternative to applying energy to the identified cells is to vent them from the processed blood, before returning it to the patient.
Repeat
After the first volume of blood has been processed and the identified pathogen cells destroyed or removed, this volume of blood is returned to the patient.
The process is then repeated with a new volume of blood taken from the patient.
Pattern Recognition
Pattern recognition processing can identify and locate individual pathogen cells (such as E. coli) within a data picture of blood that includes all the cells present in the blood.
Treatment Apparatus
The apparatus for processing comprises two components:
1. a reusable electronic processor unit
2. a disposable plastic casette
A single plastic disposable cassette unit is used for each patient treatment. The cassette is inserted into the processor unit and is connected by a two-lumen catheter to the patient. A blood pump transfers blood through the catheter from the patient, into the cassette and then back to the patient.
Blood in the cassette is processed to destroy the pathogen cells in the blood or to remove the pathogen cells from the blood. The processing continues for a period of time until the concentration of pathogen cells in the blood is reduced to a sufficiently low level to allow the patient to recover from the infection.
After the processing procedure has been completed for a patient, the cassette is removed from the processor unit and is disposed of as medical waste.