Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Biotech / Medical : Caprius(CAPR), Breast MRI(former ANMR/MAMO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mdt who wrote (2299)	12/10/1997 2:18:00 AM
From: luis a. garcia	Respond to of 2615

Not a nerve you hit the spinal cord...xray people crack me up... I agree with a lot of what you say with a few major exceptions. Actually more than a few.. xray people are similar to big tobacco.. the bigger the better ... FDA gets on their ass no problem cut their budget fire their director and problem solved.. Tobacco never killed anyone right not addictive right? Does not cost society a few billion a year for cancer treatment right.. How else can we justify big cancer research without big tobacco big pollution and big xrays and big nuclear radiation in general sun included.. XRAY is called when you turn the beam down a little to blur up a film... then when you turn it up to KILL cancer cells and any other cell that crosses its path and make your hair fall off is called RADIATION treatments (TALK ABOUT BELIEVING IN your ON POSTS PLEASE! watch your own mouth) you and I know its the same thing XRAYS kills cells and causes mutations with a probability number of resulting in CANCER.. so what comes first the xray or the cancer? I mean why are screenings going up at the same time breast cancer is increasing in the female population??? Did you get your brains caught in an xray beam or something??? huh! Never mind they made FDA increase the acceptable levels of radiation and increased leakage etc never mind that. Just to accomodate the more power full dosis of digital xray beams from the retired star warriors.. and meet new FDA QUaLITY standard guidelines... Well your train and your trained xray robots and your xray economy's wheels will come off some day when a more enligthened public will figure it all out. As for the Aurora it is a cost effective dedicated scanner which addresses a very important need in the mammography practices. For instance just go FDA and find out in what percentile your particular institution scored.. Say it is in the 50% percentile and you just spent a grand total of 50 dollars on your wife's xrays and they found them to be cancerous or probably so... are you then going to go to an equally mediocre practice to have her breasts removed?? of course not. I wouldn't think so. Oh but6 You can spend 30,000 dollars on a four wheel RV or a saiboat or whatever but you are going to limit your wife's healthcare costs to 50 bucks??? get it?? It does not compute ??.. I would see to it the women in my life went to a highly rated practice top 25 percentile and saw a competent radiologist and got an accurate diagnosis.. As for the economics of false posititives and bad medicine and bad quality etc..it is worth doing the analysis and if I had data I would do it for the hell of it believe me. Because its cheaper getting it right and taking care of it. i.e. projecting the right amount of treatment into the trauma no more no less. Well the women in my life are worth an MRI scan... not that there is a shortage of females in California.. I just love them a lot and don't want them to be sick or disfigured. what are the women in your life worth? no less of course. I have a friend whose lifelong companion and the mother of his kids recently passed away from a cancer of the uterus or something and a simple test administered in time would have saved her. But the capitated hmo told her to take aspirin and ignore the persistent bleeding. Now there are three kids 8-14 with no mother.. but hey we got it covered 50 bucks or in her case a few visits at 5 or 10 bucks and a tube of aspirin.. society's cost be dammed.. crank up those xrays mdt... zoowieeeeee! wowww! The only thing that conforts me is there are still companies and people doing the right thing figthing the odds with a vision and a purpose. That is the pioneer spirit which made america great. I sure hope you are not doing your homework or a turn paper or something...but if you are stick with it you will figure it out sooner or later.. luis

To: mdt who wrote (2299)	12/10/1997 3:20:00 AM
From: luis a. garcia	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

XRAY people just so you don't think I am being harsh on you or anything yesterday I was attending a seminar at Sony with some experts from Japan working on latest technology... and the subject of hot electrons came up.. Hot electrons result when alpha particles or other form of radiation hits a proton and imparts enough energy to an electron to send it carrening out of orbit at a high rate of speed and crashes into a memory cell altering its programmed state and causing a software error.. We were discussing Flash which is a kind of memory chip silicon and metal to be exact and the thing about this type of memory is that you isolate the programing pin from the transistors memory cells such that it takes a lot of voltage to couple a charge into the cell which then stores it as a one or 0. until it is discharged similarly to a 0 or 1 charged state. this holds the program that runs many handheld devices... like your cell phones for instance. Well I asked Dc Chiba-san about xrays at airports and courthouses etc.. and their effect on these devices.. the answer astonished me..mind you this is not dna we are talking about this is silicon. isolated silicon gates to be exact. Well it turns out that it does affect the charge of these cells and its error is handled by sophisticated error correction codes etc and still one in one thousand affected customers will issue a complain. (meaning the damage was to more than just one cell) Now I am working with Intel who wisely is trying to avoid the issue to determine the exact failure rate and then using the fudge 1/1000 determine how many cell phones in the population go down every day due to xrays and alpha alone.. when you consider we build 400k per month... its a significant number..I bet .. more on that later.. now imagine flesh DNA and tissue what chance does it really stand??? just simple probabilities game thats all... you get lucky based on simple probability... why play xray roulette?? and if we do why do it anymore than we have to.??? maybe that is really what was on the minds of those wise idiots that determined based on xrays women shouldn't be screened till age 50... figure it out... MRI is safe. INTEL actually coats the silicon die (silicon is beach sand..actually) with a Polyimide layer to protect it from xrays and alpha's and hot electrons etc.. what do we coat our womens breasts with???? huh!!! huh!!! but we are so fucking smart we got the cost down to fifty bucks.. and now we increase the acceptable levels Please it is sooo ridiculuos...so fucking ridiculous... write a paper on that.. luis

To: mdt who wrote (2299)	12/10/1997 10:22:00 AM
From: Hunter Trout	Respond to of 2615

mdt, you write: <<< but thousands of radiologists and millions of research dollars can't be wrong>>> I beg to differ. Remember the margarine craze? Don't eat butter, eat margarine to minimize risk of heart disease? So what's the current research showing? Margarine is high in trans-fats (hydrogenated oils) which appear to be even worse for you than saturated animal fats. So now butter may in fact be less harmful than margarine. Better yet, about 25 years ago, a physician at Harvard was researching risk factors for heart disease and proposed a novel theory that serum cholesterol was not in fact the primary culprit, but rather, homocysteine levels were. His recommendation? Folic acid, a simple B-vitamin controls homocysteine, so take folic acid. He was ridiculed by his peers and exiled to a VA hospital, while research money continued to pour into cholesterol studies. Guess what the latest theory and recommendation is today? You got it - he was right. So to say that if most leading scientists and research studies agree on something then they CAN'T be wrong, is at best naive. Finally, x-rays cause cancer. There is no debate on that. The debate is on what constitutes acceptable levels of radiation. The current conventional wisdom is that the amount most of us typically receive through diagnostic and screening procedures such as mammography is acceptable when considering risk vs. benefit. Recently, there was some research published about a genetic disorder called Ataxia Telangiectasia. The gene responsible for it (called the Ataxia Telangiectasia Mutant or ATM gene) was found. Although the actual disorder is rare, it is estimated that about one percent of the population carry the ATM gene. One of the findings was a correlation between families with extraordinarily high rates of cancer (including breast cancer) and presence of the ATM gene. It was also found that these individuals appear to be exquisitely sensitive to ionizing radiation, raising the question of whether levels of radiation acceptable for most of us, are actually carcinogenic in those instances. One of the recommendations for women with very strong family histories of breast cancer is regular screening with x-ray mammography beginning at a much earlier age. I'm sure you can figure out the question that begs. Safer technologies like MRI will continue to evolve, and I would suggest that your smug defense of x-ray will ultimately not withstand the test of time. HT

To: mdt who wrote (2299)	12/11/1997 12:08:00 AM
From: tony pham	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

mtd, it's not worth it to argue with this guy, Luis. Nothing can change his mind. He is investing with his heart and not his brain. He will blast away any posting that is negative. But that's ok, it's his money. My last post here was over a year and I still follow this thread just to see if he has waken up yet but apparently not. To all (-Luis), at this level the down side is minimum, but I would wait for a turn around in terms of revenue and positive results of Aurora before investing anymore. There is time when this does happen. I believed in the technology but I am not sure if the company can pull it off. One thing I have learned is never to fall in love with a stock. good luck, -t

To: mdt who wrote (2299)	12/11/1997 11:53:00 AM
From: Roland Chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

mdt, In your 12/10/97 post,---- "And finally I think you're confused on the use of MR mammo. It's NOT a screening technology -- even Jack admits to that. It's a diagnostic technology, meaning AFTER a problem is picked up by the x-ray, THEN a woman will be referred -- same day -- for a follow-up exam, perhaps an MR exam, maybe on an Aurora, maybe not. And guess what? An MR will NEVER replace a biopsy. It may rule out a few." ------ I think Aurora is not used for a follow-up exam, can you tell us where do you get the above info ? Thanks, Roland geocities.com