IGCAR device to treat mentally challenged people

Chennai: The Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) has developed the country's first Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUID), a device that can help to treat mentally challenged people and heart ailments, a IGCAR top official said today.

SQUID's sensitivity is so high that it is possible to detect even the tiny magnetic field associated with physiological activities of human heart and brain, IGCAR director Dr Baldev Raj told reporters on the sidelines of Ramachandra Universities' foundation day celebrations.

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"This device, which was indigenously made couple of days back at our unit, would be useful to cure mentally challenged people," he added.

The device would help to identify defective nerves to enable doctors to treat them. It would also help to treat heart ailments, he said.

"SQUID based measurement of biomagnetic fields is expected to complement the conventional diagnostic tools such as ECG and EEG," he claimed.

The device would be available for public within a couple of years, he said. "Currently, we are testing the device in various aspects. We have been able to observe the magnetic field signal from human heart and also the signals corresponding to the alpha rhythm of human brain," he said.

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He said the IGCAR is working on a diagnostic tool which would detect breast cancer at very early stage.

With the device, the infrared thermal imaging, the surface mapping of temperature using infrared sensors, would be used to identify the presence of diseases like cancer or for monitoring recovery processes such as wound healing.

He said studies carried out using infrared thermography indicated that the technique is effective for non-invasive diagnosis of peripheral vascular disease with good correlation of clinical findings.

On the biomaterials research, Baldev Raj said the process of wear of implant materials was being studied extensively using sophisticated techniques such as bioferrography. "This research would help in developing improved materials to extend the lifetime of orthopaedic implants such as knee and hips," he added.

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