My last few blog posts have focused on how tablet computers and clinical trial apps may change the way we conduct trials. In order to better explore the impact of tablets on the pharmaceutical industry, I decided it was important to understand how they are being used more generically in business.

My hobby is aviation and flying. I therefore either work or play in two of the most highly federal-regulated industries. In this context, I couldn't help but notice the wide divergence in the use of relatively new medical apps and aviation apps for tablet technology use in these two industries. In the aviation world, computer tablet technology has been fully embraced and there has been a rapid uptake of its use in the cockpit. In the area of clinical trials there is a paucity of use, although in medicine in general there has been a fast uptake See my previous blog post on "Clinical Apps for iPad and Tablet Use in Medicine and Clinical Trials" for lists of apps and other links.

For those of you who have followed this blog for a while will recall we had a series in the use of tablets (iPads, androids, etc.) in medicine and clinical trials. It has been a while since I have provided any updates on clinical apps and so the time seemed appropriate.

There is no doubt that medical imaging ultrasound has it’s origins in the development of naval sonar, used to combat the threat of German submarines in the First World War. The field of acoustics is littered with well known names such as Pierre and Jacques Curie who discovered the piezo-electric effect in 1880. A powerful high frequency ultrasonic echo-sounding device was later developed by eminent French physicist Paul Langévin and Russian scientist Constantin Chilowsky. They called their device the 'hydrophone.’ Between 1915 and 1918 the hydrophone was further improved in classified research activities before being deployed extensively in the surveillance of German U-boats and submarines, and this is where our unsung hero enter the scene.

Study protocol training is one the highest impact factors to acquire quality medical imaging data in clinical trials. When a multi-year clinical trial receives data from many sites all over the globe, it is of paramount importance that the study protocol is followed closely so that when data is pooled at the end of the study, there is a minimum systematic error (variance) due to non-compliance of the protocol by the various sites. The concept of accuracy is probably of secondary importance to precision since in most clinical trials, it is the change of a measured parameter over a period of time that is the primary study outcome. Precision is the ability of a particular site to reliably make repeated measurements. This was discussed in greater detail in Chapter 12 of the book "Clinical Trials in Osteoporosis" by Springer, which I co-edited.

This blog is being written on a flight back from San Diego where I have just attended the OARSI (Osteoarthritis Research Society International) meeting and the ASBMR (American Society of Bone and Mineral Research) conference. While it was great that they were co-located in the same city, it was a very tough time trying to go between the two meetings, which both had some great science and debates on imaging in osteoarthritis and bone.

I was listening to an Adam Carolla podcast this morning, and he was talking about coffee. His discussion about coffee prompted me to start a comparison to CDISC standards. Adam thought that the federal government should mandate coffee makers to all have the feature that stops the drip process when the pot is removed, allowing us all that first cup without making a mess. This line of thought prompted Adam to wish for a mandate on beer bottle caps. Shouldn’t they all be twist off? Why do we have both twist off and pry off tops? Or, if there are two kinds of tops, shouldn’t they be identified by color or something to let us easily know how they work?

There is a very interesting new FDA strategic plan that has just been issued in August 2011 entitled "Advancing Regulatory Science at the FDA."

This is a second follow-up to my recent blog post on what happened flying back from the Osteoarthritis Imaging Conference. Aside from a variety of clarifying questions, I've found that the topic has consistently turned to one regarding compensation and specifically: "Did the airline give you a free flight in return for saving them a huge expense?"

On October 1, 1971, CT scanning was first introduced by Godfrey Hounsfield into medical practice with a successful scan on a patient at the Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, London using a prototype scanner. It is now almost forty years since that date which means that many of today’s radiologists have grown up in a world where there has always been computed tomography. Technology quickly becomes adopted and we happily take it for granted. Although today’s CT scan clinical trial technology is absolutely astounding, I still find it fascinating to discover some of the lesser known facts surrounding its evolution.