Medical

Live 3D imaging is one of the hottest topics in optics today, transforming medical imaging capabilities and delivering the immersive experience behind AR and VR. During The Optical Society's Light the Future centennial program in Heidelberg, Germany on 26 July, Dr. Joseph Izatt of Duke University and Microsoft's Bernard Kress gave an insider's look at how these technologies are advancing medicine and changing the future of how we intera...

Imagine a device that could transport drugs to any diseased site in the body with the help of a small magnet. Researchers at the University of California San Diego have taken a step toward that goal by developing nano-sized vessels, called nanobowls, that could be filled with drug molecules and controlled with magnets for guided delivery to specific tissues and organs, including cancer tissue, small organs such as the pancreas and hard to access ...

A real-time fertility monitor, using technology developed at the University of Bristol, has been launched to help women identify their ovulation window and increase the chances of pregnancy. OvuSense is a sensor and fertility app which measures a woman's core body temperature overnight and then produces a daily graph to identify when a woman is most fertile.

An international team of researchers has developed an ultra-thin health monitoring device that affixes to the skin like a patch and looks somewhat like a tattoo. As they note in their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the tiny device is able to monitor skin temperature, UV exposure, heart rate, changes in skin colour and blood oxygen level. Fitbit and other devices like it have become popular over the past few years as people ...

Researchers have engineered living bone tissue to repair bone loss in the jaw, a structure that is typically difficult to restore. The team led by researchers from Columbia University, New York, grafted customised implants into pig jaws that resulted in integration and function of the engineered graft into the recipient's own tissue. The work, reported in Science Translational Medicine, suggests that personalised bone grafts for facial ...

A group of Russian physicists, with the contribution from their Swiss colleagues, developed a way to use the therapeutic effect of heating or cooling the tissues due to the magnetocaloric effect. The article with the results of the work was published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Refrigeration. A team of the Lomonosov Moscow State University scientists proposed a way to use the magnetocaloric effect for the targeted del...

A team of University of Pennsylvania researchers has developed a computer model that will aid in the design of nanocarriers, microscopic structures used to guide drugs to their targets in the body. The model better accounts for how the surfaces of different types of cells undulate due to thermal fluctuations, informing features of the nanocarriers that will help them stick to cells long enough to deliver their payloads.

MIT engineers have developed a microfluidic device that replicates the neuromuscular junction - the vital connection where nerve meets muscle. The device, about the size of a U.S. quarter, contains a single muscle strip and a small set of motor neurons. Researchers can influence and observe the interactions between the two, within a realistic, three-dimensional matrix. The researchers genetically modified the neurons in the device to respond...

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a flexible wearable sensor that can accurately measure a person's blood alcohol level from sweat and transmit the data wirelessly to a laptop, smartphone or other mobile device. The device can be worn on the skin and could be used by doctors and police officers for continuous, non-invasive and real-time monitoring of blood alcohol content.

IBM scientists have developed a lab-on-a-chip technology that can, for the first time, separate biological particles at the nanoscale and could enable physicians to detect diseases such as cancer before symptoms appear. As reported today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the IBM team's results show size-based separation of bioparticles down to 20 nm in diameter, a scale that gives access to important particles such as DNA, viruses and ex...