Biotech and Medtech - Inventions & Patents

The following alert was recently sent out by the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons:
“On Sept. 27, 2007, Christopher J. Christie, US Attorney for the District of New Jersey, announced the results of his two-year investigation into the legality of certain relationships between five hip and knee surgical implant manufacturers and orthopaedic surgeons.  The companies - Zimmer, Depuy Orthopaedics, Biomet, Smith and Nephew, and Stryker - have avoided criminal prosecutions about payments made to surgeons to use their products by agreeing to new corporate compliance procedures and federal monitoring for 18 months.  Compliance with federal law by all of these companies going forward is the key element of these agreements.”

There were serious criminal complaints against the four leading hip and knee implant manufacturers namely Biomet, DePuy, Smith & Nephew and Zimmer by the US Attorney General of New Jersey.  These implant manufacturers were accused of using lucrative consulting arrangements with orthopedic surgeons to induce them into using their particular line of implants.  According to WSBT 22, South Bend, IN, the three Warsaw, IN manufacturers (Biomet, DePuy and Zimmer) paid a whopping $311 in fines.  In a Deferred Prosecution Agreements, these complaints will be dismissed in 18 months, if the implant manufacturers comply with the agreed-upon reform requirements which include:

1. Determination of a genuine need for consultants.
2. Physicians to disclose their financial engagement to patients and hospitals.
3. Provide a list of names and amount paid of all consultants on their website in a prominent fashion.

And here is where you will find the payment list….

·  Biomet Payment List

·  DePuy Payment List (.pdf)

·  Zimmer Payment List (.pdf)

Now you know how much are the consultant surgeons are paid.

The Turk was a chess-playing machine of the late 18th century, promoted as an automaton but later proved to be a hoax. It was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master to hide inside and operate the machine. The point is that a human always out think a machine (most of the time) in situation requiring cognitive skill.

The new twist to the internet age is to integrate human intelligence with machine intelligence seamlessly through the internet. The new scheme was supposedly conceived by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. They call it HIT and it stands for Human Intelligence Task. According to Amazon HITS are tasks that somebody is willing to pay you to complete. For example a HIT might ask: “Is there a pizza parlor in this photograph?” Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer. You will be paid but only fraction of a pennies for each task depending on the complexity. One demonstration of this is the now famous satellites photo search for Steve Fossett. Tens of thousands of people have contributed time to examine millions of images which provided valuable leads to those conducting the search on the ground.

We have been abstracting patent data from web pages for the last three years using regular expressions (www.wizpatent.com). A regular expression, often called a pattern, is an expression that describes a set of text. Simplistically this is the text recognition equivalent of image recognition. We have been getting pretty good at abstracting complex text pattern. Our accuracy is slowly and steadily creeping up but will be never perfect. Here in comes our new strategy for a killer app we are building. It will be applied to bibliography management for peer review journal articles. Academics have spent their whole career working on perfecting citation parsing using artificial intelligence. However the strategy for our new product (called WizFolio) is to use highly honed brute force regular expressions, combined with real human intelligence and leveraged on reliable public domain database. WizFolio Express is due for alpha release in early December and WizFolio Web is due for alpha release in January 2008. Watch out Zotero!

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Amazon Mechanical Turk