Vaccines can be delivered through the skin using ultrasound. This method doesn’t damage the skin and eliminates the need for painful needles. To create a needle-free vaccine, Darcy Dunn-Lawless at the University of Oxford and his colleagues mixed vaccine molecules with tiny, cup-shaped proteins. They then applied liquid mixture to the skin of mice and exposed it to ultrasound – like that used for sonograms – for about a minute and a half.

  • Wrench@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    $2k is largely the doctors time for the procedure, plus interpretation (sometimes another doctor entirely, particularly when multiple opinions are warranted).

    Of course, the equipment probably isn’t cheap either

    Edit - damn. Looks like I was very wrong on this one!

    • CptOblivius@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      90-95% of imaging cost is the technical fee. An ultrasound is usually 0.5 to 1.0 RVUs roughly. So let’s say 1. The RVU rate for radiologists right now is around $45-60 an RVU. So of the $2k for the ultrasound, a Radiologist will make about $50 of it.

    • Lodra@programming.dev
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      11 months ago

      In my recent experience, that wasn’t the case. Ultrasound at the ER was $370 for the contracted radiologist. And a whipping $1700 for a 5 minute use of the machine.