Medical

The exoskeleton VariLeg is the work of an interdisciplinary team of 11 ETH students and doctoral candidates. The first prototype was developed by nine Bachelor’s students from the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering in the course of a focus project from autumn 2014 to spring 2015. The exoskeleton, which will now be put into action at the Cybathlon, is a further development of this prototype and grew out of a subsequent focus pr...

Configurable power supplies from TDK-Lambda are the first 1,200 to 1,500W-rated versions to have full Means of Patient Protection (MoPP) isolation. The QM series of AC/DC power supplies are also claimed to have the lowest acoustic noise at that power level, for use in medical or healthcare environments.

  For children with speech and language disorders, early-childhood intervention can make a great difference in their later academic and social success. But many such children — one study estimates 60 percent — go undiagnosed until kindergarten or even later.

Sound can now be structured in three dimensions. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Stuttgart have found a way of generating acoustic holograms, which could improve ultrasound diagnostics and material testing. The holograms can also be used to move and manipulate particles. Peer Fischer, a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Professor at the Univer...

The promise of stem cells to treat cardiovascular disease may soon be a step closer to clinical application as scientists from three institutions seek to perfect and test three-dimensional “heart patches” in a large animal model. In theory, the heart patches, engineered tissue composed of the several different types of cells that make up heart muscle, would be implanted to replace diseased or damaged tissue and would perform all ...

The medical power supplies’ global market is rapidly expanding. According to a MarketsandMarkets report ‘Medical Power Supply Market by Technology’, the sector, estimated at $642 million in 2012, is forecast to reach $866.8 million by 2017

Sticky nanoparticles that deliver drugs precisely to their targets—and then stay there—could play a crucial role in fighting ovarian and uterine cancers. A team of researchers at Yale found that a treatment using bioadhesive nanoparticles loaded with a potent chemotherapy drug proved more effective and less toxic than conventional treatments for gynecological cancer.

The combination of graphene nanoribbons made with a process developed at Rice University and a common polymer could someday be of critical importance to healing damaged spinal cords in people, according to Rice chemist James Tour. The Tour lab has spent a decade working with graphene nanoribbons, starting with the discovery of a chemical process to "unzip" them from multiwalled carbon nanotubes, as revealed in a Nature paper in 2009.

  Ireland’s first world renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ‘Hacking Medicine’ event took place at DCU Alpha (Dublin City University’s Innovation Campus), over the weekend, seeking to uncover treatment outcomes for patients.

Researchers at Uppsala University have used computer modelling to study how brain tumours arise. The study, which is published today in the journal EBioMedicine, illustrated how researchers in the future will be able to use large-scale data to find new disease mechanisms and identify treatment targets. The last ten years’ progress in molecular biology has drastically changed how cancer researchers work.