Medicine & Health

WUSTL computer engineers are bringing the minimalist approach to medical care and computing by coupling USB-based ultrasound probe technology with a smartphone, enabling a compact, mobile computational platform and a medical imaging device that fits in the palm of a hand.

HallahanDennis Hallahan has been chosen to head the Department of Radiation Oncology at the School of Medicine. Hallahan will be named the first Elizabeth H. and James S. McDonnell III Distinguished Professor in Medicine. He will also serve on the Senior Leadership Committee of the Siteman Cancer Center.

Certain characteristics of preschool-aged children at high risk for asthma could help physicians deliver more personalized and effective treatment. Researchers at the School of Medicine and five other sites nationwide found that children who showed the most improvement in days without wheezing using an inhaled corticosteroid drug were caucasian boys who had allergies and had a hospitalization or emergency department visit for asthma symptoms in the year prior to the trial.

Working with an asthma coach helps to significantly reduce hospitalizations of low-income, African-American children with asthma, results of a new, two-year study show. Researchers at the School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill worked with nearly 200 parents of children between 2-8 years old on Medicaid who had been hospitalized for asthma at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

“Timely identification and diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can impact a child’s development and is the key to opening the door to the services and therapies available to children with autism,” says Paul Shattuck, Ph.D., assistant professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. “Unfortunately, our research shows that the average age of autism diagnosis is nearly six years old, which is three to four years after diagnosis is possible.” Shattuck is the lead author of an article on the timing of ASD identification in the current issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Video available

A drug widely used to shrink enlarged prostates has been shown to lower the risk of prostate cancer by 23 percent in men who have an increased risk of the disease, according to results of an international clinical trial presented April 27 at the American Urological Association annual meeting in Chicago.

The School of Medicine remains No. 3 among research-oriented medical schools, according to the 2010 edition of U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Graduate Schools.” The rankings appear in the April 28 issue of the magazine and in an annual guidebook.

The search for the cause of an inherited form of a rare, aggressive childhood lung cancer has uncovered important information about how the cancer develops and potentially sheds light on the development of other cancers. The finding by researchers at the School of Medicine and other collaborating institutions adds the final link to the chain connecting the gene DICER1 to cancer development.

David Kilper/WUSTL PhotoComputer engineers at Washington University in St. Louis are bringing the minimalist approach to medical care and computing by coupling USB-based ultrasound probe technology with a smartphone, enabling a compact, mobile computational platform and a medical imaging device that fits in the palm of a hand. William D. Richard, Ph.D., associate professor of computer science and engineering, and David Zar, research associate in computer science and engineering, have made commercial USB ultrasound probes compatible with Microsoft Windows mobile-based smartphones, thanks to a $100,000 grant Microsoft awarded the two in 2008.

Assisted hatching, a procedure commonly thought to improve pregnancy rates during in vitro fertilization (IVF), does not affect outcomes in most women younger than 38 years old, according to researchers at the School of Medicine. The findings are available online in Fertility and Sterility.