March 15th, 2013
In many ways the Holy Grail in transplantation is to convert a body's own cells into stem cells, turn those into neural cells, and then integrate them into functional circuitry within the brain. Until now, only pieces of that puzzle have been possible. Su-Chun Zhang, who was the first to convert embryonic stem cells (ESCs), and...
March 14th, 2013Researchers from King’s College London have successful grown rudimentary teeth from a combination of human epithelial cells taken from adult gums, and mesenchymal cells borrowed from mouse embryos. After the cell mixture was incubated in culture, it was transplanted to the kidney of a mouse where it developed into recognizable, but...
March 13th, 2013A new kind of endoscope technology with a factor of four image improvement over any previous design has recently been demonstrated by researchers from Stanford University. It may lead to flexible endoscopes producing about 80,000 pixels at a resolution of three-tenths of a micron, as compared to 10,000 pixels at three micron resolution...
March 7th, 2013Oxford Performance Materials (OPM) out of South Windsor, CT has announced that it has received FDA 510(k) clearance for its new OsteoFab 3D printed cranial device. This marks the first approval for an additively manufactured polymer implant. The new OPM device is a cranial maxillo-facial (CMF) plate for skull reconstruction which can...
March 5th, 2013A large study published some time ago in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that cardiac surgery patients who received older blood during surgery were almost twice as likely to die than those who received younger blood. Although studies like this are always multifactorial, considering what you pay for these surgeries you...
March 1st, 2013Autism and agenesis of the corpus callosum (AgCC) are distinct conditions - the first is behavioral while the second anatomical. Yet about 40% of people born with AgCC show clear indications of autism. Diffusion tractography is a 3D rendering technique that uses data from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), to map out cortical connections....
February 28th, 2013
It's not the big electromagnet in an MRI that makes implanted hardware problematic, it's the pulsing current in the smaller gradient coils -- the ones used to generate the position dependent signals. Sylvain Martel, an engineer at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, realized that if those coils can move things in the body, then...
February 25th, 2013 Engineers at Cornell University used 3D printing techniques to build a new external human ear. The outer ear, also called the auricle, or pinna, was constructed using an extrudable gel made of living cells. Over a 3 month period the ears grew cartilage to replace the collagen base that was used to mold them. Cartilage is an ideal...
February 22nd, 2013Traumatic head injury not only can result in immediate seizures, it often causes chronic seizures which are frequently resistant both to medication and surgical intervention. For these cases, local cooling of the brain has been investigated both as a way to short-circuit seizure activity once it has begun, or even prevent them from...
February 21st, 2013The New Scientist has reported on a new device called Tongueduino that gives its users the ability to sense and perceive their environment using their tongues. The name comes from the use of a Arduino microcontroller board, an open source development environment that has enabled the rapid deployment of a host of sophisticated new...
February 14th, 2013Second Sight Medical Products has won FDA approval for its Argus II bionic eye for the treatment of late stage Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP). This announcement comes after the European approval in 2011, and widespread support from the FDA’s Ophthalmic Devices Advisory panel. The Argus II system was apparently shortlisted for approval under...
