HealthWatch: newborns and the language of surgery December 9, 2006

Newborns probably able to feel pain: research

Many doctors refrain from giving newborns pain relief during surgical procedures in the belief that they do not feel pain, but new research shows this could be wrong, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden said…  “using infrared spectroscopy … show that pain signals from a pin prick are processed in the cerebral cortex of premature babies in the same way as in adults.” …  The results … are expected to have “a major impact on pain-relief management for newborn babies as well as on approaches to child development in general”.

Computer scientists unravel ‘language of surgery’

Johns Hopkins computer scientists are building mathematical models to represent the safest and most effective ways to perform surgery, including tasks such as suturing, dissecting and joining tissue…  Complicated surgical tasks, Hager said, unfold in a series of steps that resemble the way that words, sentences and paragraphs are used to convey language. “In speech recognition research, we break these down to their most basic sounds, called phonemes,” he said. “Following that example, our team wants to break surgical procedures down to simple gestures that can be represented mathematically by computer software.”