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Category: biotech/medical – Page 942

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For many of us, the act of breathing comes naturally. Behind the scenes, our diaphragm — the dome-shaped muscle that lies just beneath the ribcage — works like a slow and steady trampoline, pushing down to create a vacuum for the lungs to expand and draw air in, then relaxing as air is pushed out. In this way, the diaphragm automatically controls our lung capacity, and is the major muscle responsible for our ability to breathe.

But when the diaphragm’s function is compromised, the breathing instinct becomes a laborious task. Chronic diaphragm dysfunction can occur in people with ALS, muscular dystrophy, and other neuromuscular diseases, as well as patients with paralysis, and damage to the phrenic nerve, which stimulates the diaphragm to contract.

A new proof-of-concept design by MIT engineers aims to one day boost the diaphragm’s life-sustaining function and improve lung capacity for people with diaphragm dysfunction.

Continue reading “MIT engineers design a soft, implantable ventilator” | >

Two doctors at the Max Super Specialty Hospital in India has documented the filarial dance of scrotal worms on video. In the video, the undulations of live worms residing in a male patient’s scrotum can be seen.

The began as a 26-year-old man came to the hospital complaining of testicular pain. He told them it was associated with swelling of his scrotum and had been bothering him for approximately one month. He also had a slight fever. Suspecting some type of parasite, the doctors first examined the man using ultrasound after which they extracted some of the fluid that had built up in the scrotum for inspection by lab techs. They also took for the same purpose.

The lab tests showed a large number of absolute eosinophil in the and the ultrasound showed anechoic tubular channels along with an absence of color flow. Additionally, echogenic, linear structures could be seen moving around inside one of the channels—an activity the doctors described as a filarial dance.

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Year 2020 face_with_colon_three

An international team of scientists have restored the vision in blind rats using a nanoparticle-based artificial retina prosthesis that can be injected directly into the eye. The scientific advance has been successfully demonstrated for a period of eight months without the need for surgery. While it is still early days for the research, it suggests it might one day be possible to use the conjugated polymer nanoparticle (P3HT-NP) treatment in humans to correct eye problems –ranging from hereditary retinal dystrophies to the incredibly common age-related macular degeneration.

“In our ‘liquid retina device,’ P3HT nanoparticles spread out over the entire subretinal space and promoted light-dependent activation of spared inner retinal neurons, recovering subcortical, cortical and behavioral visual responses,” Fabio Benfenati, research director at the Italian Institute of Technology, told Digital Trends. “We think that P3HT-NPs provide a new avenue in retinal prosthetics.”

Retinal prostheses refer to implantable devices that are designed to help restore sight in patients with retinal degeneration. They work by introducing visual information into the retina through the electrical stimulation of surviving retinal neurons. While promising, current retinal prostheses have so far been shown to only return low-resolution vision: Useful for things like distinguishing between light and dark or recognizing simple shapes and objects. This new nanotech approach appears far more promising, offering significantly higher resolution. After just one injection, activity in the rats’ visual cortex and visual acuity were the same as those found in healthy rats.

Continue reading “Nanotech Injections Restore Vision In Blind Rats” | >

Year 2018 😗

State-of-the-art software tools for neuronal network simulations scale to the largest computing systems available today and enable investigations of large-scale networks of up to 10% of the human cortex at a resolution of individual neurons and synapses. Due to an upper limit on the number of incoming connections of a single neuron, network connectivity becomes extremely sparse at this scale. To manage computational costs, simulation software ultimately targeting the brain scale needs to fully exploit this sparsity. Here we present a two-tier connection infrastructure and a framework for directed communication among compute nodes accounting for the sparsity of brain-scale networks. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by implementing the technology in the NEST simulation code and we investigate its performance in different scaling scenarios of typical network simulations. Our results show that the new data structures and communication scheme prepare the simulation kernel for post-petascale high-performance computing facilities without sacrificing performance in smaller systems.

Modern neuroscience has established numerical simulation as a third pillar supporting the investigation of the dynamics and function of neuronal networks, next to experimental and theoretical approaches. Simulation software reflects the diversity of modern neuroscientific research with tools ranging from the molecular scale to investigate processes at individual synapses (Wils and De Schutter, 2009) to whole-brain simulations at the population level that can be directly related to clinical measures (Sanz Leon et al., 2013). Most neuronal network simulation software, however, is based on the hypothesis that the main processes of brain function can be captured at the level of individual nerve cells and their interactions through electrical pulses. Since these pulses show little variation in shape, it is generally believed that they convey information only through their timing or rate of occurrence.

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Could zebrafish’s ability to regenerate the heart work in mammals as well?

The processes by which zebrafish repair injury to their hearts were combined with viral vectors used in human gene therapy, according a study published today (Dec .13) in Cell Stem Cell.

Repairing-related genes that can be ‘shut-off’.

Continue reading “Gene therapy could save mice from heart attacks — humans could be next” | >

Detect and kill oral cancer quickly; otherwise, it’d be too late.

In January 2022, a report from the American Cancer Society predicted 54,000 new oral cancer cases in the US. The same report also suggested 11,230 deaths.

This is why early diagnosis is critical for patients suffering from oral cancer. A team of researchers realized this and developed a point-of-care bio-sensor that could allow easy, quick, and accurate detection of oral cancer in humans. Commons.

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Tel Aviv-based D-ID released today the first multimodal generative AI video platform to combine text, image and animation in one interface. The self-service video platform integrates D-ID’s proprietary generative AI technology with GPT-3 from Open AI and Stable Diffusion from Stability AI, allowing users to generate digital composite faces and speech in 119 languages based on their text prompts.

“This is a game changer for creators,” says Gil Perry, D-ID co-founder and CEO. “It’s the bleeding edge of generative AI,” he asserts, touting the startup’s expertise in deep learning and computer vision. When I talked to Perry last year, he said that the company’s long-term vision is “to lead the next disruption in the video entertainment space by creating AI-generated synthetic media in a responsible way.”

In the rapidly evolving generative AI space, “long-term” means “next year,” so now Perry talks about providing “digital humans” to enterprises, “transforming the way we communicate with machines and elevating our capabilities as humans.” He hopes that sometime next year, we could chat with the digital humans we will create with D-ID’s help.

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Hitting two targets at the same time may be the key to stopping the spread of aggressive cancers, according to new research from the University of East Anglia and the Quadram Institute.

Researchers have found that in mice could be stopped by simultaneously targeting two signaling switches that trigger growth of new blood vessels.

Their study, published in the journal Cancer Research Communications, points to new approaches for treating cancer in humans.

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