A team of researchers in Ireland has collaborated on developing a new fluorescent molecular probe that can hone in on and light up cancer in an exciting new way. The technology will hopefully have important consequences for cancer resection surgeries, allowing physicians to remove tumors while sparing healthy tissues. Previously developed fluoresce (Read more...)
Author: Medgadged
NuVasive Releases Pulse Spinal Surgical System
NuVasive, a company based in San Diego, California, is releasing its Pulse system. The product combines a number of technologies, including neuromonitoring, global alignment, rod bending, imaging with radiation reduction, and navigation, to help surgeons perform spinal procedures. The system is intended to be the core procedural component of any sp (Read more...)
NuVasive Releases Pulse Spinal Surgical System
NuVasive, a company based in San Diego, California, is releasing its Pulse system. The product combines a number of technologies, including neuromonitoring, global alignment, rod bending, imaging with radiation reduction, and navigation, to help surgeons perform spinal procedures. The system is intended to be the core procedural component of any sp (Read more...)
Blood Flow Measurement Using Tiny LED Catheter
Measuring blood flow is important during a variety of surgical procedures, as well as in intensive care settings. Typically, this is performed intermittently, so there’s not a lot of temporal detail in the readings. Now, a team of researchers at Flinders University in Australia has developed a proof-of-concept prototype vascular catheter that (Read more...)
Printing Skin, Bones for Surgeries on Way to Mars
Traveling to Mars, our closest planet and which may one day serve as another base for humanity, is very far away. Any practical mission there and back will take years. The health of the astronauts undertaking such a journey will be paramount, so researchers are working on ways to be able to create customized tissues […]
av-Guardian Makes AV Fistula Access Easy for Dialysis
To perform hemodialysis, vascular access needs to be available on a regular basis. Veins are naturally too fragile for this, but arteries are too deep seated to be tapped frequently. Arteriovenous (AV) fistulas, which link an artery and a nearby vein, are typically created to overcome this since after only a few weeks the vein […]
D-mine Pump for Continuous Delivery of Parkinson’s Meds
EVER Pharma, based in Austria, won CE Mark approval and is releasing its D-mine Pump in Europe. Designed to deliver apomorphine hydrochloride, a dopamine agonist medication used to treat Parkinson’s, it has a few features that are tailored for the patients that it is intended to treat. Apomorphine hydrochloride helps many Parkinson’s pa (Read more...)
New Mini-MRI Prototype to Maximize Image Quality and Patient Comfort
Scientists at Imperial College London have developed a “mini-MRI” scanner prototype that they believe will change the way clinicians diagnose knee injuries. The research, recently published in the journal Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, describes accurate visualization of the knee joint anatomical structures in animal trials. The protot (Read more...)
Jellyfish Robot to Deliver Drugs Inside Body
At the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, a team of scientists has created a tiny robot that mimics the jellyfish. Its physical appearance and movements could certainly be mistaken for a real life jellyfish, as it elegantly plops up and down within a liquid medium. “The idea behind this project was twofold,” said Dr. [&hellip (Read more...)
BIOMONITOR III Injectable Cardiac Monitor Wins FDA Clearance
Having unveiled their BIOMONITOR III a couple of weeks ago, BIOTRONIK just won FDA clearance for the device. The new version of the BIOMONITOR injectable cardiac monitor is less than half the size of the previous model, but it offers the ability to provide a substantially improved signal quality. Designed to be injected under the […]
Tiny Nanowire Probes Measure Intracellular Electrical Activity
Researchers at the University of Surrey and Harvard University have developed tiny nanoprobes that can measure electrical signals inside cells, such as neurons and cardiac cells. Unlike previous technology for intracellular electrophysiology, the nanoprobes cause minimal destruction to the cells, and could pave the way for human-machine interfaces (Read more...)
Superhydrophic “Nanoflowers” for Biomedical Applications
Researchers from Texas A&M University have developed new nanomaterial with superhydrophobic properties. Their recent publication demonstrates that by controlling atomic-scale defects in their nanomaterial, they could use it to repel water and blood on glass, paper, and other common materials. This exciting development can lead to self-cleaning (Read more...)
Artificial Bacterial Protein Allows Stem Cells to Home to the Heart
Researchers at the University of Bristol have developed a way to make stem cells move toward heart tissue when they are injected intravenously. The treatment could improve the efficacy of stem cell therapies for heart disease, which are currently hampered when most injected cells are filtered out of circulation by organs such as the lungs [… (Read more...)
Automatic Glasses Track Eyes to Adjust Focus
As we grow older, the lenses of our eyes become stiffer, making it difficult to focus on nearby objects. Presbyopia, as the condition is called, is typically managed using reading glasses and progressive lenses. These, though, only work well when the user’s head points toward the intended area of focus. Now, a team of engineers […]
Crystallized Drugs to Protect Implants from Immune Attack
Implantable medical devices that intimately interact with the human body are often subject to the immune system’s foreign body response (FBR). This creates scarring around the implants, reducing their functionality over time. Now, scientists at MIT have developed a way to embed crystallized immunosuppressant drugs into implantable devices so (Read more...)
Low-Cost OCT Retinal Scanner for Cheaper Eye Screenings
Researchers from Duke University have developed and clinically tested a new low-cost, portable optical coherence tomography (OCT) retinal scanner. Their work, recently published in the journal of Translational Vision Science and Technology, demonstrates that, when tested on 60 patients with and without retinal diseases, their device has image quali (Read more...)
Microfluidic Chip Allows Embryonic Stem Cells to Differentiate
Complex multicellular organisms, such as ourselves, start out from stem cells that differentiate into different kinds of cells. This process is controlled by groups of cells that secrete special signaling molecules called morphogens, which guide nearby stem cells to turn into the kinds of cells that should be located in that region. This is an [&he (Read more...)
Floating Flexible Sensor to Monitor Engineered Tissues and Cell Cultures
Tissue engineering is a vibrant research field poised to revolutionize how we heal organs and tissues following damage from injury and disease. One of the difficulties that scientists working with cultured cells discover is the inability to closely monitor a number of characteristics of their cellular cultures. One reason is that water and electron (Read more...)
Radiation-Free Guidance for Vascular Catheters Using Smart Fiber Optics
While modern catheters can reach into various parts of the body, navigating there remains a major challenge. Fluoroscopes that emit X-rays are used to constantly keep track of the catheter location, but they emit ionizing radiation and require a great deal of protection to be used by clinicians. Engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital [&h (Read more...)
Low Cost Medical Devices for Low-Resource Regions: Interview with Prof. Saad Bhamla, Georgia Tech
Advances in medical technology continue apace, with sophisticated new medical devices and therapies becoming available on an ongoing basis. However, medical technology often comes at a premium, and for low-resource regions sometimes even relatively basic medical devices, such as hearing aids, are inaccessible because they are too expensive. Similar (Read more...)