Medical

In the campy 1966 science fiction movie "Fantastic Voyage," scientists miniaturise a submarine with themselves inside and travel through the body of a colleague to break up a potentially fatal blood clot. Right. Micro-humans aside, imagine the inflammation that metal sub would cause. Ideally, injectable or implantable medical devices should not only be small and electrically functional, they should be soft, like the body tissues with which they i...

USC researcher Megan L. McCain and colleagues have devised a way to develop bigger, stronger muscle fibers. But instead of popping up on the bicep of a bodybuilder, these muscles grow on a tiny scaffold or "chip" molded from a type of water-logged gel made from gelatin. First authors Archana Bettadapur and Gio C. Suh describe these muscles-on-a-chip in a new study published in Scientific Reports.

A research team from Kiel led by Professor Hermann Kohlstedt, Head of the Nanoelectronics Department at Kiel University and spokesman of the national collaborative research project "Memristive devices for neural systems", funded by the German Research Foundation, aim to track this impressive efficiency of the human brain using technology and to implement its method of operation in artificial neural networks.

A series of medical DC converters, the ‘G&H’ series, has been launched by PowerPax, from global power conversion manufacturer Mornsun. This range features un-regulated dual output, G series and single output, H series, parts in both 1 and 2W variants in an industry standard SIP package which is manufactured of black flame-retardant and heat resistant plastic (UL94 V-0 rated).

Power Sources announces the addition of the high-power density, 400W, multi-output NXT-400M series to their Integrated Power Designs AC/DC power supply portfolio. It is available in open frame or optional chassis and cover package. The NXT-400M series meets EN60601-1 3rd edition (BF) medical and EN60950-1 ITE certifications.

University at Buffalo researchers will soon be testing in the U.S., Europe, Australia and Latin America a software tool they developed that could make assessing brain atrophy part of the clinical routine for MS patients. The research is funded by Novartis, as part of its commitment to advance the care for people with MS with effective treatments and tools for assessment of disease activity.  

The artificial pancreas - a device which monitors blood glucose in patients with type 1 diabetes and then automatically adjusts levels of insulin entering the body - is likely to be available by 2018, conclude authors of a paper in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes). Issues such as speed of action of the forms of insulin used, reliability, convenience and accuracy of glucose monitors plus cybersecurit...

  Stimulating the visual cortex of the brain for 20 minutes with a mild electrical current can improve vision for about two hours, and those with worse vision see the most improvement, according to a Vanderbilt University study published in Current Biology.

German engineers have created a camera no bigger than a grain of salt that could change the future of health imaging—and clandestine surveillance. Using 3D printing, researchers from the University of Stuttgart built a three-lens camera, and fit it onto the end of an optical fibre the width of two hairs. Such technology could be used as minimally-intrusive endoscopes for exploring inside the human body, the engineers reported in t...

Getting spacecraft ready for launch may have more to do with medical research than you think. For a study on microbes that may be associated with a history of breast cancer, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, employed the same sequencing and analysis methods used for examining bacteria in spacecraft assembly rooms. Those techniques were designed for planetary protection—ensuring that NASA spacecraft do no...