A Medical Device Daily

Lifeline Biotechnologies (Reno, Nevada) said it is preparing to file a patent application covering certain advancements achieved as a result of its continued R&D program concerning it First Warning System a process to assist in the early detection of breast cancer.

"We have received the preliminary draft of a patent application from the company's corporate patent counsel," said Jim Holmes, CEO of Lifeline. "The application covers certain Neural Net Based Classification of Breast Cancer with blind thermal data screening for detecting breast cancer in women. This patent will add substantially to the intellectual property of the company in terms of protecting its ability to use the temperatures given off by the earliest and smallest breast tumors as a means of detecting breast cancer at a stage when treatment is less invasive and less costly."

"The new technology represents a refinement designed to minimize the likelihood of false positive results with the First Warning System," added Louis Keith, MD, Lifeline's Medical Director

Lifeline recently reacquired the First Warning System from Solos Endoscopy (Boston) (Medical Device Daily, March 8, 2007), which it had sold in 2006.

The company said it will focus on completing the development of the system, designed to assist in the early detection of breast cancer.

It said the underlying technology, upon which the device is based, holds the possibility of eliminating more than 90% of unnecessary breast biopsies performed each year.

In other patent news: VivoMetrics (Ventura, California) reported that the U.S. Patent Office granted the company a patent for its cough identification system algorithm, bringing the total number of its patents for its physiologic monitoring to 13.

The company said that this algorithm functions by scanning patient data collected by the company's LifeShirt, a wearable, ambulatory life-sign monitor, for simultaneous sound events and chest wall movements.

Cough is a critical measurement for research in many areas and as incidence and prevalence of respiratory-related disease increases, the ability to effectively measure cough in patients will have a significant impact on drug development, patient monitoring and effective patient diagnosis, the company said.

VivoMetrics said it has identified the unique movement and sound characteristics associated with cough and has validated their algorithm against hand-scored video records, the traditional cough measurement. By developing the cough algorithm, VivoMetrics said it is able to accurately measure cough in patients without the need for patient self-reporting or laboratory-based monitoring.