Diagnostics

The skin patch
With the bulky equipment out dating, the ultrathin skin patch, less than the diameter of a human hair, is attached to the skin just like a temporary tattoo.

Mehmet Toner, study leader and a professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard Medical School, along with Brian Wardle, an MIT associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics, has created an instrument that could eventually allow doctors to see if cancer has spread from its original site faster than ever.

Circulating tumor cells, which are cancer cells that escaped from the original tumor, are hard to distinguish since 1-milliliter of blood sample contains a few of them amongst tens of billions of normal blood cells.

The newly introduced tax is likely to make healthcare costlier to the tune of 5 to 10 percent, hospital authorities say.

In the last year’s budget, individuals who footed the bill themselves were not in the tax net. The service tax then was on patients whose payments for treatment were made by the health insurance companies or businesses.

Finance Minister proposes amendments for service tax