Johns Hopkins Grows New Ear for Patient Who Had Cancer and Had Part of Her Ear and Face Removed–New Ear Grown in Her Arm & Transplanted to Face

To contact us Click HERE

This is very cool as the forearm of the patient was used as the area to “plant and grow” her new ear.  If you have been reading about regenerative medicine for a while you might remember from about 3 years the mouse that had the human ear growing on it, so it looks as though this has progressed in a very short amount of time to have a human patient who needed her ear to have this surgery.  The doctor used cartilage from her rib to create an ear so while it was growing she looked at the ear on her arm.  There were several surgical procedures to attach the ear, so out of the arm it came once grown on to where her ear is. 

She still has 2 more surgeries to go and the ear should last for a long number of ears.  She wears a hearing aid to use the left ear.  There’s a link below that shows a number of slides with the growing and removal process of the ear.  This is pretty amazing stuff.  BD

---

The discovery of a rapidly-spreading basal cell cancer in her ear in 2008 required the removal of part of her ear, part of her skull and her left ear canal. But now, in a groundbreaking and complicated set of surgeries, Johns Hopkins doctors have attached a new ear made from Walters’ own tissue.

“We started making jokes just to try to get used to it and I was like, `Can you hear me? Can you hear me?’ said Sherrie’s husband, Damien.

Byrne later surgically attached the ear and its blood vessels. Then surgery Tuesday added shape and detail to the ear.

Click here to see a special slideshow from Johns Hopkins.

http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2012/09/26/hopkins-doctors-give-woman-a-new-ear/

Technorati Tags: Johns Hopkins,Ear,surgery,plastic surgery,regenerative medicine,cancer

Knome Introduces First Plug and Play Human Genome Supercomputer Interpretation System–knoSYS100, It Runs Behind Client Firewalls for Privacy and Security–No Cloud Needed

To contact us Click HERE

George Church has come a long way since the Polonator, which was introduced in 2008 and sold for $150,000.  This one is $25,000 less and probably does a whole lot more.  The knoSys100 is both a hardware and software system that transforms sequence data produced by various platforms into a standard richly annotated and easy comparable data set.  Now here’s a little technical information as it runs over 1.2 teraFLOPS, it includes four 2.4GHz 8-core/16 thread Intel^® Xeon^® E5-2665 processors (32 cores), and 18TB to 54TB of useable disk storage and Gigabit Ethernet.  It comes in one enclosure and can be used in a laboratory environment. 

The Polonator - the DNA Machine for $150,000

Another feature, privacy here as it is installed on premise and maintained behind the client firewall for those places who do not wish to send data to third parties or to the cloud.  Privacy and consent concerns are handled.  Today at Oracle, they just announced both their private and public cloud offerings to take on Amazon.  Knome also states that the unit can accept data from Complete Genomics, Illumina and Life Technologies which is a big selling point of their technology. 

In summary, this is a big and powerful plug and play unit and it’s function is to get useful medical information from a patient’s DNA.  BD

---

Knome Inc. announced today that it is taking orders for the knoSYS™100, the first plug-and-play, fully integrated hardware and software system designed to help researchers in medical and academic institutions interpret human whole genomes. The knoSYS™100 was developed to help geneticists discover relevant genetic variation, investigate diseases of unknown cause, and create next generation in silico gene tests. Units will begin shipping in Q4, 2012.

Starting at $125,000, the knoSYS™100 is based on Knome’s big data informatics technology. The system will accept next generation sequence data from leading sequencers, including those sold by Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN), Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE), and Complete Genomics (NASDAQ: GNOM).

More than a dozen of the world’s top medical institutions have joined an early access program to pilot Knome’s genome interpretation technology, including: ARUP Laboratories, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, Hyundai Cancer Institute at CHOC Children’s, University of Liverpool, and University of Verona.

http://www.laboratorynetwork.com/doc.mvc/knome-introduces-the-knosys100-first-plug-0001

Technorati Tags: Knome,genomics,sequencing,George Church,healthcare,research and development

Steward Healthcare Gives Up on Acquiring Landmark Medical Center in Rhode Island and Prime Healthcare Moves In For the Deal

To contact us Click HERE

For three years Steward had been working on acquiring the hospitals and the day after they give up and after loaning the hospital, Prime Healthcare steps in.  Prime has also agreed to pay back a good portion of the Steward loan.  Landmark also had issues with a Blue Cross lawsuit that was still hanging out there.

Blue Cross Sues Financially Stressed Landmark Hospital in Rhode Island-Court To Determine New Owner in April

I don’t know how it will work in Rhode Island but the link below somewhat describes what happens when Prime moves in, layoffs and a lot of what is not profitable goes out the door.  They do focus on their ER services though as normally Prime does not sign agreements with insurance carriers and charges their normal customary fees.  BD

Prime Healthcare Buys Alvarado Hospital In San Diego–One More Cadillac ER Room On the Way

---

Steward Health Care System said Thursday that it’s terminating its agreement to acquire Landmark Medical Center, the Woonsocket, RI, hospital it had been seeking to buy for the past three years.

Boston-based Steward, which said it loaned Landmark about $7 million to pay off its debt, fund operations and maintain its payroll, said it was backing out of the asset purchase agreement because health care parties in Rhode Island and the special master who had run the bankrupt hospital had failed to meet conditions specified in the deal.

http://www.boston.com/businessupdates/2012/09/27/steward-health-care-terminates-its-agreement-buy-landmark-medical-center-woonsocket/Alk9JpodhkCFNm6baqqHsN/story.html

Sergey Aleynikov Files Suit Against Goldman Sachs For $2.4 Million to Recover Court Costs and Refuses New York State Plea Offer To Admit to Stealing Trading Computer Code

To contact us Click HERE

This case gets more interesting by the moment.  You can read to where a judge over turned his original conviction and I commented there as all as far as getting a jury of peers with sophisticated trials such as his.  The judge may not be a code expert who over turned his sentence due to the fact that he was not intending to use for interstate commerce, a fine line it appears in the legal interpretation.  Now the state of New York is going at it and frankly how are they going to prove their case?  I’m not saying one way or the other as far as guilt or innocence but darn there’s so much to cover here and I’m sure he was operating from subversion so everyone knows who has what code checked out for sure, how it works and keeps an audit trail.

Now Aleynikov  is suing Goldman Sachs as well for his legal fees and time it took for the case that was overturned for $2.4 million.  I say go for it for sure.  Again cases as such have to be very specific and actually prove a number of items and there was no denial of taking the code as again without knowing how Goldman is set up, all code checked out runs an audit trail.  The US court system is not prepared for cases as such as they complex and again a jury of peers would be difficult to find.  I’m not saying that a regular jury is dumb by any means but the level of proving such a case has risen a number of notches in the last few years for sure.  How does a layman jury know the difference between open source and proprietary code?  They don’t.  Again the files seemed to be small and it would more than likely be a module that has to work with other queries and algorithms as well so until that was actually proven in court with a visual from a programmer that could show how this would be done, I don’t think there’s anywhere for this case to go.  BD

Goldman Sachs Programmer Who Went to Jail for Stealing Code Has His Conviction Overturned–You Can’t Get A Jury of Peers Off the Street for Crimes With High Tech Algos

---

NEW YORK -- A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc computer programmer indicted on charges of stealing trade secrets has rebuffed a plea offer that would keep him out of prison, his lawyer said on Thursday.

Sergey Aleynikov, 42, was formally indicted Thursday on New York state criminal charges of stealing proprietary trading code from the bank. The indictment is the latest development in a years-long legal battle between Aleynikov and federal and state prosecutors.

Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joanne Li told State Supreme Court Justice Ronald Zweibel that her office had offered Aleynikov a sentence of time served in exchange for a guilty plea. Under the proposed deal, he would not have to serve additional prison time beyond the roughly one year he already served following his conviction on federal charges.

Aleynikov had served nearly a year of an eight-year prison sentence before the appeals court ordered him released. If convicted in state court, Aleynikov could face up to four years in prison. 
His conviction was reversed in part because the appeals court said the Justice Department failed to show that the stolen code was intended for "interstate commerce," a necessary element under the federal Economic Espionage Act.

Earlier this week, Aleynikov sued Goldman in New Jersey federal court for $2.4 million in legal fees, demanding that the bank cover his costs of fighting the federal prosecution. The lawsuit claims Delaware law and the bank's bylaws entitle corporate officers to indemnification when they successfully defend themselves against charges.

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/data-security/ex-goldman-programmer-rejects-plea-deal/240008144

Technorati Tags: Sergey Aleynikov,code,Goldman,court,trading,New York

Insurance Company Celebrates 50 Billionth (F Bomb) Over of Customer–The Onion (Humor)

To contact us Click HERE

We all need a little bit of humor here and there and this is one is just so funny and leave to the Onion with their satire to give us a laugh.  What really even made this funnier was Wendell Potter, healthcare advocate used to have this job at Cigna and tweeted thank goodness I don’t work there anymore:)  Why Cigna, who knows as this could represent any health insurance company for sure.  I got a kick out of the coding remarks too as how often have we not heard that and we have HHS, hospitals, insurers swapping “spit” if you will with incentives and fines, makes it hard to budget for hospitals for sure. 

How many times have we felt this way?  Again as I always say, it’s the Attack of the Killer Algorithms we all face today with code and formulas running on servers 24/7 making life impacting decisions about all of us, and the the amount of flawed data is on the rise as well, so be aware.  I try to be g rated here so I changed the working but see all of it in it’s glory at the Onion and same for the image below…there’s more to it.  BD

---

CANTON, OH—Overjoyed Cigna executives celebrated the health insurer’s 50 billionth fucking over of a customer Thursday, personally surprising 56-year-old spinal trauma victim Clyde Gershon with champagne, confetti, and hundreds of multicolored balloons as they denied his most recent disability claim.

The wheelchair-bound Gershon, who has required an expensive regimen of pills and physical therapy since a 2010 car crash, was greeted at his front door by cheering, party-hat-wearing members of Cigna’s senior management, who posed for pictures while presenting him with an oversized cardboard “Claim Denied!” letter explaining that he was judged fit to return to work and would lose all coverage at the end of the month.

“So congratulations, Mr. Gershon, you poor son of a bitch,” he continued, raising a flute of Dom Perigno. “On behalf of myself and the rest of our 30,600 employees, I hope you find some other way to pay for your medical care, because you are now royally f**ked!”

Excitement continued to grow throughout the summer as eager employees began refusing claims for procedures the company had previously covered by saying that they “hadn’t been coded right,” which accelerated its march towards 50 billion by an additional 200,000 f**king-overs per day.

Speaking to reporters on Gershon’s front yard, Nicoletti reiterated that despite reaching the long sought-after goal of 50 billion, the company was still as committed as ever to f**king more and more people over.

By the 49,975,000,000 mark, a party atmosphere reportedly began to engulf Cigna’s Bloomfield, CT headquarters. Claims processors would reportedly f**k patients over first by waiting weeks to pay their medical providers, and then by sending them the wrong amount. Gleeful telephone operators f*ked over customers by openly hanging up on the ones who had called to protest being f**ked over.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/insurance-company-celebrates-50-billionth-fucking,29709/