Wounds: how skin can regenerate after severe burns

People who suffer severe burns or extensive skin injuries are often left to live with extreme scarring, disfigurement, and skin that feels chronically tight and itchy. That's because the body's healing processes have evolved to focus on preventing infection by quickly closing up wounds, rather than regenerating or restoring normal skin tissue.

Versatile new material family could build realistic prosthetics

Nature's blueprint for the human limb is a carefully layered structure with stiff bone wrapped in layers of different soft tissue, like muscle and skin, all bound to each other perfectly. Achieving this kind of sophistication using synthetic materials to build biologically inspired robotic parts or multicomponent, complex machines has been an engineering challenge.

Machine learning tool predicts intestinal disease in premature infants

Researchers from Columbia Engineering and the University of Pittsburgh have developed a sensitive and specific early warning system for predicting NEC in premature infants before the disease occurs. The prototype predicts NEC accurately and early, using stool microbiome features combined with clinical and demographic information. The pilot study was presented virtually on July 23 at ACM CHIL 2020.

Spinal cord injuries treatment improvement

When injured, the spinal cord swells, restricting blood flow, resulting in further, often critical and permanent motor, sensory, and autonomic function damage. Rapid prevention of spinal cord swelling immediately after injury is key to preventing more serious damage. The only treatment to date has been steroid therapy with methylprednisolone, which is minimally effective.

Replacing hip prostheses – removing bone cement with the laser

When hip prostheses are replaced, the old bone cement in the femur must first be removed – a complicated procedure. The Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH) is developing an endoscope-based laser system with which doctors should be able to remove the old cement more gently and with an improved vision.