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Archives for June 2019

Paul McGivern Recognized in the 2019 Canadian Legal Lexpert Directory

Wednesday, June 5, 2019 By Admin

Paul McGivern

We are very pleased to announce that both partners at Pacific Medical Law have been recognized as “Leading Practitioners” in the 2019 Canadian Legal Lexpert® Directory in medical malpractice. This designation is a significant acknowledgment of their expertise in this very specialized and complex area of law.

Paul McGivern  has been selected as a leader in medical malpractice litigation by The Canadian Legal Lexpert® Directory. Paul is a senior litigator acting exclusively on behalf of plaintiffs in medical negligence cases, with an emphasis on complex catastrophic cases such as birth trauma, spinal cord and brain injury cases. He is frequently consulted by counsel throughout Canada for his expertise in this area. He has a unique background of 17 years as medical malpractice defence counsel and a reputation for understanding the medical and legal issues of complex malpractice actions. Paul has been lead counsel in hundreds of medical malpractice cases, has litigated legal precedent setting cases and has appeared as lead counsel before every level of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada (most recently in Ediger v. Johnston 2013 SCC 18 and Cojocaru v. British Columbia Women’s Hospital 2013 SCC 30).

In addition to being an advocate for the clients of Pacific Medical Law, Paul has been an adjunct legal professor at the University of British Columbia where he has taught civil procedure for 18 years. He is a sought after speaker and has organized and chaired a number of continuing education programs focusing on medical legal issues. Paul was a Director of the Medical Legal Society of B.C. and is a member of the Trial Lawyers Association of BC. In addition, Paul is a founding member of BILA, the Birth Injury Lawyers Alliance.

Filed Under: Firm News

Susanne Raab Recognized in the 2019 Canadian Legal Lexpert Directory

Wednesday, June 5, 2019 By Admin

Susanne K Raab

We are very pleased to announce that both partners at Pacific Medical Law have been recognized as “Leading Practitioners” in the 2019 Canadian Legal Lexpert® Directory in medical malpractice. This designation is a significant acknowledgment of their expertise in this very specialized and complex area of law.

Susanne Raab has been selected as a leader in medical malpractice litigation by The Canadian Legal Lexpert® Directory. Susanne’s practice focuses on representing individuals and families who have suffered injuries as a result of medical malpractice, with a focus on birth injuries and catastrophic brain and spinal cord injuries. Susanne has appeared before the Supreme Court of BC, the BC Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada. Prior to joining Pacific Medical Law, Susanne represented physicians in complex medical malpractice actions.

Susanne is actively involved in advocating for individuals living with disabilities, and serves as the President of the Board of Directors as well as Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Cerebral Palsy Association of British Columbia.  She is also on the Board of Governors of the Trial Lawyers Association of BC which is committed to improving access to justice for all British Columbians. She is a member of BILA, the Birth Injury Lawyers Alliance and a Fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America, an honorary trial lawyer society whose membership is limited to less than one-half of one percent of North American lawyers, judges and scholars. Susanne is also an adjunct professor at the UBC Allard School of Law where she teaches the medical negligence course to 2nd and 3rd year law students.

Filed Under: Firm News

Scientists Develop Method to Convert Brain Signals into Speech

Monday, June 3, 2019 By Andrea Donaldson

Many people – including some of our clients – have lost the ability to speak following accidents, injuries such as strokes, or neurodegenerative disorders. Scientists have recently developed a method that could dramatically impact the way these people are able to communicate.

People who have lost the ability to speak as a result of injury or disease are often forced to use painstaking means of communication using small physical movements, such as head or eye movements. A famous example, physicist Stephen Hawking, used a muscle in his cheek to type keyboard characters which a computer then generated into speech. Now, scientists have developed a way to use brain signals to program a computer to mimic natural speech. As reported recently in Nature, scientists have developed a system that decodes the brain’s vocal intentions and translates them into speech. The hope is that one day, this technology could be used to help people who cannot speak.

Previously, researchers have been able to decode brain signals that indicate the recognition of letters and words (sound representations), but those approaches were not as fluid or fast as natural speech, only producing speech at a rate of about eight words per minute. The new system works by deciphering the brain’s motor commands that guide vocal movements during speech – tongue and lip movements – and generates intelligible sentences that approximate the individual’s natural rhythm of speech. This new system, which represents a leap from decoding single syllables to sentences, is able to produce about 150 words per minute, the natural pace of speech.

In researching this new method, participants were implanted with electrode arrays, which are stamp-sized pads containing hundreds of electrodes placed on the surface of the brain. Each participant recited hundreds of sentences, and the electrodes recorded the firing patterns of neurons in the brain. The researchers associated those patterns with the subtle movements of the participant’s lips, tongue, larynx, and jaw that occur during speech. The team then translated these movements into spoken sentences. Simply mimicking the act of speaking provided the computer with enough information to recreate several of the same sounds.

The researchers then had people listen to the virtual voices to assess the fluency, and found that approximately 70% of the virtual speech produced was intelligible. The study showed that the speech decoder works with mimed or mimicked words, but it is still unclear if it would work with words that people only think, without moving their mouth. The team is planning to move to clinical trials to further test the system.

The team also found that a synthesized voice system could be used and adapted by someone else, suggesting that an off-the-shelf virtual voice system could be possible one day. The field of brain-machine interface technology, as it is known, is rapidly advancing, with teams around the world adding refinements that could be tailored to a specific injury.

 “With continued progress,” wrote Chethan Pandarinath and Yahia H. Ali, biomedical engineers at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, in an accompanying commentary to the study, “we can hope that individuals with speech impairments will regain the ability to freely speak their minds and reconnect with the world around them.”

Filed Under: Health News

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