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 »We’ll just have to wait for the results of the laboratory tests.« These words are familiar to many patients. It then usually takes several days for specimens to be sent to the laboratory and analyzed and for the doctor to receive the results. For many illnesses, however, a speedy diagnosis is crucial if the treatment is to be successful. In future, the patient might only have to sit in the waiting room for a few minutes until the results are ready. In a joint project, researchers from seven Fraunhofer institutes have developed a modular platform for in vitro diagnosis which enables various types of bioanalysis – of blood and saliva for example – to be conducted in the doctor’s surgery. »Thanks to its modular design our IVD platform is so flexible that it can be used for all possible bioanalytical tasks,« states Dr. Eva Ehrentreich-Förster from the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering (IBMT) in Potsdam-Golm.The core element of the mini-laboratory is a disposable cartridge made of plastic which can be fitted with various types of sensor. For an analysis the doctor fills the cartridge with reagents – binding agents which indicate the presence of certain substances such as antigens in the specimen material. Various tests or assays are available for different types of analysis. To perform an assay, the doctor only has to place the relevant substances in the cartridge and the test then takes place automatically. »We have optimized the assays so that up to 500 assay reactions can be conducted in parallel in a single analysis step,« explains Dr. Ehrentreich-Förster. Even in the case of complex analyses the doctor obtains a result within about 30 minutes. A new module on the reverse side of the cartridge also makes it possible to analyze the specimen material at DNA level.Once the cartridge has been prepared, the doctor places it in the measurement system. The results can be read out with either optical or electrochemical biosensors. The researchers have installed a readout window for both methods in the measurement system, which features a bypass through which the specimen is pumped.

To explore how such memories are recorded, the researchers showed ten volunteers three short films and asked them to memorise what they saw. The films were very simple, sharing a number of similar features - all included a woman carrying out an everyday task in a typical urban street, and each film was the same length, seven seconds long. For example, one film showed a woman drinking coffee from a paper cup in the street before discarding the cup in a litter bin; another film showed a (different) woman posting a letter. The volunteers were then asked to recall each of the films in turn whilst inside an fMRI scanner, which records brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow within the brain. A computer algorithm then studied the patterns and had to identify which film the volunteer was recalling purely by looking at the pattern of their brain activity. The results are published in the journal Current Biology. "The algorithm was able to predict correctly which of the three films the volunteer was recalling significantly above what would be expected by chance," explains Martin Chadwick, lead author of the study. "This suggests that our memories are recorded in a regular pattern." Although a whole network of brain areas support memory, the researchers focused their study on the medial temporal lobe, an area deep within the brain believed to be most heavily involved in episodic memory. It includes the hippocampus - an area which Professor Maguire and colleagues have studied extensively in the past. They found that the key areas involved in recording the memories were the hippocampus and its immediate neighbours. However, the computer algorithm performed best when analysing activity in the hippocampus itself, suggesting that this is the most important region for recording episodic memories. In particular, three areas of the hippocampus - the rear right and the front left and front right areas - seemed to be involved consistently across all participants. The rear right area had been implicated in the earlier study, further enforcing the idea that this is where spatial information is recorded. However, it is still not clear what role the front two regions play.