Medical

After decades of studies, scientists now believe that a breakthrough in preserving body organs for the purpose of saving lives is close at hand. A heart or lung is kept viable for transplantation for only six hours before deterioration begins. Pancreas or liver would go to waste after 12 hours in storage, and a kidney could be kept outside the body for less than 30 hours. These time constraints pose a tremendous logistical challenge for the proce...

The industrial engineer Iñaki Cornago-Santos has developed structures on a nanometric scale that can be used as biosensors for medical, food or environmental sectors to detect diseases, allergens or contaminants; or can be used to reduce the reflection of solar cells in order to increase their efficiency. This is what he says in his PhD thesis defended at the NUP/UPNA-Public University of Navarre.

Fluoroscopy makes guiding a catheter through a blood vessel possible. However, fluoroscopy, a form of real-time moving X-ray, also exposes the patient to radiation. Now, a University of Missouri School of Medicine researcher has evaluated technology that may be used to replace fluoroscopy, eliminating the need for X-ray during cardiac ablation procedures.

Increasingly, health care is moving out of the doctor's office and into the home, allowing greater patient freedom and monitoring, but also giving rise to new security risks. One of the main challenges facing home health technology design is the public's inability to set up a secure network in their home and keep it operational. This can lead to compromised or stolen data, or even potentially hacked devices, such as heart rate monitors or di...

Identifying a blood disorder may be as easy as running a blood sample from a finger prick under a smartphone. That is the concept behind a new biomedical device being developed by Kansas State University researchers. Kim Plevniak, master's student in biological and agricultural engineering at the Kansas State University Olathe campus, and Mei He, assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering, are working on a low cost, point-of-c...

A breakthrough in understanding human skin cells offers a pathway for new anti-ageing treatments. For the first time, scientists at Newcastle University have identified that the activity of a key metabolic enzyme found in the batteries of human skin cells declines with age. A study, published online in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, has found that the activity of mitochondrial complex II significantly decreases in older ...

In a first for medical science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pharmacy researchers turn skin cells into cancer-hunting stem cells that destroy brain tumors known as glioblastoma, a discovery that can offer, for the first time in more than 30 years, a new and more effective treatment for the disease. The technique, reported in Nature Communications, builds upon the newest version of the Nobel Prize-winning technology from 2007, which...

Ralph Mobbs, a neurosurgeon at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, made medical history in late 2015 when he successfully replaced two vertebrae with custom made prosthesis. The patient, in his 60s, suffered from Chordoma, a particularly nasty form of cancer that had formed on his top two vertebrae and threatened to cinch off his spinal cord as it grew. That would have left him a quadriplegic.

A team of food scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has successfully formulated a recipe for making healthier bread by adding a natural plant pigment, called anthocyanin, extracted from black rice. This new bread option gets digested at a slower rate – hence improving blood glucose control – and is high in antioxidants, among other health benefits.

University of Melbourne doctors and engineers are using supercomputers to create 3D models from patients with heart disease, with photos from a camera thinner than a human hair. The images, gathered during a routine angiogram, are fed into a supercomputer. Within 24 hours, a model of a person's artery is 3D printed. This gives cardiologists crucial information about the behaviour of blood flow and the precise structure of the artery from the insi...