Medical

Steve Rogerson looks at how women’s health is reaping the benefits of wearable technology.

The NHS is a permanent topic in the news, from strikes and concerns of A&E staff numbers, to care home neglect and the dangers of superbugs and healthcare associated infections (HCAI). To aid this, there have been some developments in robotics to alleviate the strain on healthcare professionals. Electronic Specifier’s Daisy Stapley-Bunten gets up close and personal with the new face of healthcare.

It’s a sad truth that there are few people who haven’t been impacted by cancer in its various forms. However, a pioneering therapy that has been developed by oncology company Novocure, has tipped the scales in the fight against brain tumours. Electronic Specifier Editor Joe Bush finds out more and talks to a cancer survivor who has benefited from Tumor Treating Fields, or TTFields therapy.

There’s no human instinct more basic than speech, and yet, for many people, talking can be taxing. One in 14 working-age Americans suffer from voice disorders that are often associated with abnormal vocal behaviours — some of which can cause damage to vocal cord tissue and lead to the formation of nodules or polyps that interfere with normal speech production.

Researchers have created a drug delivery system that could improve the effectiveness of an emerging concept in cancer treatment - to dramatically slow and control tumors on a long-term, sustained basis, not necessarily aiming for their complete elimination. The approach, called a "metronomic dosage regimen," uses significantly lower doses of chemotherapeutic drugs but at more frequent time intervals.

First-year medical students at the University of British Columbia will begin using a state-of-the-art touch-screen table that displays detailed images of internal anatomy that can be rotated, enlarged and even sliced open. The anatomy visualisation table will be used with traditional anatomical dissections to teach first-year medical students about human anatomy and the medical conditions they are likely to encounter as physicians.

Bodily self-consciousness is an integral part of our everyday life. It allows us to be instinctively aware of where we are and how we move. While this seems trivial, it requires a lot of computation and processing from our brain. But how does the brain produce and regulate it? Using a virtual reality experiment, EPFL scientists have now shown that bodily self-consciousness involves the brain monitoring heartbeat.

Scientists at Radboud University have demonstrated the first methodological approach to control the shapes of nanovesicles. This opens doors for the use of nanovesicles in biomedical applications, such as drug delivery in the body. Nature Communications published the results. The shape of nanovesicles – called 'polymersomes' in jargon – in a solution varies at different compositions of that solution, scientist Roger Rik...

Ultrasound imaging is used around the world to help visualise developing babies and diagnose disease. Sound waves bounce off the tissues, revealing their different densities and shapes. The next step in ultrasound technology is to image not just anatomy, but specific cells and molecules deeper in the body, such as those associated with tumors or bacteria in our gut. A study from Caltech outlines how protein engineering techniques might help ...

A UT Dallas physicist has developed a technology that not only sheds light on basic cell biology, but also could aid in the development of more effective cancer treatments or early diagnosis of disease. Dr. Jason Slinker, associate professor of physics, and his colleagues developed an electronic device that uses DNA molecules—the genetic material found in every human cell—and other biochemicals to simulate certain cell activity.