Plasma communication devices

Rl 19 Phillips, S., Wyndham, L., Shaw, J. and Walker, S.F. (1988). How accurately does the Reflotron dry-chemistry system measure plasma total cholesterol levels when used as a community-screening device Med. J. Aust. 149, 122-125. 

All microcomputers have at least one output device, usually a monitor screen with a printer as a second output device giving hard copy. On desk-top computers, the screen is usually a cathode ray tube, while on portable computers liquid crystal or gas plasma screens are used. EEU"ly screen displays simply emulated the teletypes used at that time to communicate with mainframe computers. These glass teletypes displayed only characters. The computer simply sent a stream of bytes to the output device. The device was electronically connected to the microcomputer in such a way that from the microprocessor s point of view the output device resembled one or more memory locations. Whenever the microprocessor wrote into these memory locations, characters appeared on the screen. The convention used on all modern microcomputers when converting from bytes to characters is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). 

In the medical device community, the surface of a material is extremely important because it is what is in contact with the body. For example, the components of implants may be plasma treated to make their surfaces more biocompatible, which reduces cell adhesion and the formation of fibrous tissue around the implant. Implantable metal devices are often passivated to make the device resistant to corrosion when subjected to the aqueous environment inside the body. 

This limitation led to the development of laser ablation as a sampling device for atomic spectroscopy instrumentation, where the sampling step was completely separated from the excitation or ionization step. The major benefit is that each step can be independently controlled and optimized. These early devices used a high-energy laser to ablate the surface of a solid sample, and the resulting aerosol was swept into some kind of atomic spectrometer for analysis. Although initially used with atomic absorption and plasma-based emission techniques, it was not until the mid-1980s, when lasers were coupled with ICP-MS, that the analytical community... 

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