Radio frequency ID tags have been touted as a way to keep track of patients and medical equipment, but how about a sponge left behind during surgery? This week's Archives of Surgery includes a study from Stanford Medical School where RFID tags were embedded in sponges, which were then deliberately left inside a temporarily closed surgical site. The tags beeped when the surgeon waved a detector wand over the site. The chips used were relatively huge, almost an inch square, and would need to be smaller to be practical for commercial use, but eventually a smaller chip could be used not only on sponges but on surgical instruments. Anesthesiologist Alex Macario told Reuters that the chips will probably never replace the before-and-after counting of sponges and instruments, but would make the system even safer. Foreign objects are left behind in about one of every 10,000 surgical procedures, according to an earlier study.
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