BioMedical Research.

human heart

Carrot is a popular veggie which can be eaten both in cooked or raw form. Mostly this healthy vegetable is eaten as a salad. For those who don't like to eat the veggie, try drinking its juice as it is good for health.

Many might have had carrot juice but may not know what benefits it gives to our body.

So, let's take a look at some of the health benefits of the juice, which we must know.

Improves immune system: Carrot contains beta-carotene which makes it a rich source of vitamin A and helps to improve the immune system of the body. Have a glass of carrot juice daily for building up a strong immune system.

Digestion: Carrot juice contains rich amount of dietary fiber which is very essential for good digestive health of the body. Regular consumption of the juice reduces the severity of health issues such as constipation and digestive problems.

Prevents acne: Drinking carrot juice not only detoxifies your body but it also helps in preventing acne as it is high in essential oils. Drink carrot juice regularly, if you want a face free from acne.

Good for eyes: Carrot juice is good for eyesight because it contains a rich source of Vitamin A which is very essential for eyes. It also helps to prevents conditions like night blindness.

So people start drinking carrot juice for keeping well!

You have heard ever since you were a child that the consumption of milk is close to essential for healthy bones and teeth. Two to three glasses a day are recommended by doctors, nutritionists, P.E. teachers and parents (especially your mom) and you’ve always been comfortable knowing that a glass of milk can’t hurt you. Well a study published in the British Medical Journal disagrees with this ancient tradition.
Over a period of twenty years 61000 men and 45000 women were observed and the results are shocking to say the least. Those who drank the most milk showed no significant decrease in broken bones, and for women the study showed that drinking milk actually increased the chance of fracture.Those who drank more than three glasses a day were deemed twice more likely to die than those that drank less than one a day.
This study is questioning claims that have been resting on the solid foundations of medical science for years. The knowledge that less than 400mg of Calcium a day is a risk has been common knowledge for years but now milk as its source is being questioned. Researchers have been recommending low fat milk for a while no because they believe that the fat in the milk cancels out the effects of calcium.This study may rock the foundations of well-established knowledge but it may also turn out to be a dead herring. Remember, research pops up all the time, it doesn’t necessarily have to be revolutionary or even right all the time.

Life as a Bionic Woman..................
A brain implant offers relief to an epilepsy patient........

Chelsey Loeb says she’s still getting used to her new cyborg life. In November, neurosurgeons implanted a stimulator in her brain to treat her intractable epilepsy, and doctors turned on the device a few weeks later. She can’t feel the electrodes that routinely send pulses of electricity into her left temporal lobe, but she often thinks about her new internal hardware: “It’s like I have an iPod in my head,” she says with a smile. One night, when she heard a mysterious beep in her darkened bedroom, her first thought was, “Did my head just beep?”
It hadn’t. Loeb’s responsive neurostimulator (RNS System), described in the accompanying article, does its work quietly. The device constantly records the electrical activity in specific areas of Loeb’s brain, scans for the signature of an approaching epileptic seizure, and then triggers a burst of stimulation. The idea is to interrupt the abnormal activity before it can spread across her brain and interfere with her movements, mood, memory, and cognition.
The 26-year-old Loeb has been on medication to control her seizures since age 15. (Disclosure: Loeb’s father, Matthew Loeb, was formerly an IEEE staff executive.) Last summer the efficacy of those pills began to decline. Almost every day was interrupted by a seizure, in which she’d seem to zone out, become incoherent, and then regain awareness with no memory of what had occurred. These blank spaces were alarming. For example: What had happened in those few minutes after she started to feel strange at a pharmacy counter and before she came to her senses next to a dumpster in a parking lot? Loeb had to give up her driver’s license, and she took a disability leave from her job as a preschool teacher in Paterson, N.J.
In search of a solution, Loeb came to the epilepsy center at New York University Langone Medical Center. Doctors there recommended the new NeuroPace RNS System, which had been on the market for about a year. Loeb’s case required two surgeries. First, surgeons draped temporary electrodes over the surface of her brain. For five days, she sat in a hospital bed with wires emerging from her head while doctors monitored the electrical patterns in her brain. “I wasn’t allowed to walk around at all,” she says. “I was literally plugged in.” Once the doctors had observed the pattern associated with her seizures, they implanted the neurostimulator in her cranium and guided its electrodes to the spots in her brain where her seizures begin.
NYU neurosurgeon Werner Doyle is a pioneer of this technology; Loeb was the 17th patient he outfitted with a commercial neurostimulator. Doyle says the device takes advantage of the brain’s remarkable self-organizing ability. “If you shut the brain down and then turn it on again, which we can do with anesthesia, it reboots itself back to normal,” he says. “That’s what the RNS does, but locally rather than globally.” And if the brain is an operating system, he says, the malfunctioning part of an epileptic brain is an application that freezes. “The RNS reboots the application so you can use it again.”
Loeb has recovered well from the surgery. She’s had a few seizures since the procedure, but most have been minor, lasting just a few seconds and not interfering with her speech or memory. The device continuously records the electrical activity in her brain, and when Loeb feels a seizure, she swipes a magnet past her head to mark that moment in the data stream and flag it for examination. At her checkups, her doctors analyze the data and tweak stimulation parameters. “They’re figuring it out,” Loeb says. “Their goal is to have me be 100 percent seizure-free.”
The doctors’ work won’t just benefit Loeb. As her doctors learn how to better control her seizures with pulses of electricity, they’ll also be learning about the neural circuits that govern the human body. Doyle hopes that every time he implants electrodes into an epilepsy patient’s brain, he’ll get better at integrating the stimulator into the nervous system. “The more this device becomes like the brain, the better it will work,” says Doyle. “That’s the future.”

Wearable Vitals Tracker..................

In order to better care for patients, infants, and the elderly, research teams worldwide are investigating novel ways to continuously monitor people's health by tracking key life signs such as heart rate and body temperature. Such applications require sensors that are flexible and wireless for maximum comfort, self-powered to avoid replacement of batteries, and cheap enough to permit disposable use to ensure proper hygiene.
A new wearable electronic device that is the brainchild of scientists at the University of Tokyo might fit those criteria. It’s an armband that combines a temperature sensor to measure body heat under the arm, a piezoelectric speaker to provide audible feedback, amorphous silicon solar cells for power, and circuits made of organic ink printed onto a plastic film. The same researchers previously developed flexible electronic skins with an eye toward covering prosthetic limbs and humanoid robots.
The team said the medical armband contains the first organic circuit able to produce sound, and is first device to incorporate an organic power supply circuit. These organic circuits increase the range of illumination at which the armband can operate by 7.3 times; this allows it to be used indoors.
The armband can emit an audible buzz when the body temperature it detects exceeds a preset limit. That temperature can be anywhere between 36.5 and 38.5 degrees Celsius. The scientists do not plan on incorporating a video display onto the armband. “We think sending information wirelessly is more important," said the study’s lead author, Hiroshi Fuketa.
The researchers noted the armband could incorporate other sensors to monitor heart rate, blood pressure, or moisture, as well as a flexible battery to store energy from the solar cells so the device can continue working after dark. The scientists will present the armband at the 2015 IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco on 24 February.

Diagnosing Ear Infections With a New Smartphone Gadget.........

One of the most welcome trends in health care is the emergence of consumer gadgets that can help people deal with their medical needs at home, avoiding the agony of doctors’ offices and, even worse, emergency rooms. The newest entry in field is the Cellscope Oto, a clip-on gadget that turns a smartphone into an otoscope, the tool that doctors use to peer into an ear and check out a patient’s eardrum.
Cellscope has just begun selling a pro tool for doctors, but the more interesting development is a consumer version that parents will soon be able to keep in their medicine cabinets, next to their thermometers.
The company just began pre-sales for its at-home version in California, and will roll out the campaign in other states in 2015. The gadget works only with iPhones right now, but the company is working on a version that will work with all smartphones.
As most parents know, ear infections are incredibly common among kids: The NIH says 80 percent of children will have at least one ear infection before age 3, and kids who are prone to these infections may have them again and again. Rather than schlep into the doctor’s office or ER with a screaming kid to get a diagnosis and antibiotic prescription, the Cellscope Oto will let a parent take a photo or video of their kid’s eardrum and send it to an on-call physician. The doctor can then make a diagnosis and call in a prescription to a pharmacy, if necessary.
Wilbur Lam, chief medical officer for Cellscope and a professor of both pediatrics and biomedical engineering at Emory University in Atlanta, says the clip-on gadget uses the phone’s camera, a few simple lenses and some fiber optics to generate the magnified images that are sent to the doctor. “The image quality is pretty good, almost as good as looking with a standard otoscope,” says Lam. The photos and videos can also be integrated into a patient’s electronic medical record.
In addition to offering convenience for parents, Lam says the Oto could also reduce health care costs. “Ear infections are one of the most common pediatric diseases, and it’s one of the top reason kids are brought to the emergency room,” Lam says. “Although you would think it’s not a big deal financially—how much could it really cost to do a physical exam and look in a kid’s ears?—it’s so common that collectively it’s a major cost burden on our health care system,” he says.
What’s more, by enabling parents to easily send a pediatrician photos of their tykes’ worrisome eardrums, Lam hopes the Oto will encourage doctors to take a “watch and wait” attitude in ambiguous cases, rather than prescribing antibiotics to be on the safe side. “If we are able to decrease antibiotic prescriptions, we could therefore decrease antibiotic resistance, which is a big deal,” he says.

Blasts of Ultrasound Could Get Needed Drugs Into the Brain

New focused ultrasound arrays can temporarily breach the blood-brain barrier:
There’s a barrier in your brain.
Composed of very densely packed cells in the capillary walls, it restricts the passage of substances of the wrong size or chemistry from the bloodstream. Like a locked fence around your home, the blood-brain barrier prevents intruders—such as infective bacteria—from entering.
But a locked fence can also keep out rescuers in an emergency, and the blood-brain barrier keeps out potentially helpful drugs that might be able to ease the suffering of the tens of millions of people with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and other diseases of the central nervous system. Less than 5 percent of the roughly 7000 available drugs can get through. Basically, none of the large-molecule drugs can, severely limiting the options for new therapies.
But there’s hope. Blasts of ultrasound can temporarily open the barrier in tightly focused spots of the brain that are just millimeters in diameter. And engineers at Chang Gung University, in Taiwan, have recently come up with a much improved way of delivering that energy.
The prototype device they developed is a 256-channel ultrasound phased array. According to electrical engineering professor Hao-Li Liu, his team has developed a unique circuit design involving multiple microcontrollers and power-sensing feedback circuits that enable the system to deliver two frequencies at once instead of the single frequency that biomedical researchers have been working with. By altering the phase of individual channels, the array produces millimeters-wide spots of ultrasound energy that can be electronically steered to any point in the brain.
It’s been known for a while that ultrasound reversibly opens the blood-brain barrier, even if the exact workings haven’t quite been nailed down. The process relies on the acoustic cavitation effect, which is the growth and collapse of microbubbles in a liquid under the influence of an ultrasonic field. (Microbubbles are injected as a contrast agent to enhance ultrasound imaging.) This effect generates an acoustic shock wave, which causes the cells in the blood vessel walls—called endothelial cells—to deform.
“Like mimosa leaves, endothelial cells contract after being shocked, thereby generating gaps. The result increases the possibility of drug delivery,” Liu says, adding that other cells outside the ultrasound’s focal point are undisturbed. Doctors can deliver drugs for about 1 to 2 hours, after which the gaps close.
Therapeutic ultrasound machines available on the market today destroy benign tumors of the uterus and other tissue mostly using a single frequency to generate heat at the ultrasound array’s focal point.
Using two frequencies simultaneously instead can boost the power of these machines three- to fivefold, according to Liu. Greater cavitation “significantly enhances the blood-brain barrier opening,” he says.
In tests using pigs—which have a similar skull thickness to that of humans—the portion of the brain the researchers were aiming for took up 10 times as much of a test dye under the influence of ultrasound as it would have otherwise. They operated the array to produce either 400 kilohertz energy, 600 kHz (an “ultraharmonic” of 400 kHz), or both at once. The dual frequency produced the best results—nearly double what the single frequency delivered without causing damage. “Of course, the performance of different drugs vary,” Liu says.
Elisa Konofagou, associate professor of biomedical engineering and radiology at Columbia University, in New York City, who studies the mechanics of focused ultrasound’s effects, is concerned that the Chang Gung group might not be able to improve further on the results of their system. “The frequency range seems to be on the low end,” she says. “The frequencies would activate larger microbubbles—greater than 2 micrometers—when most microbubbles used are around 1 micrometer. So I’m not sure how they would enhance it.”
Liu counters that using multiple frequencies theoretically has a greater chance of exciting more bubbles. A bubble’s resonance frequency is primarily determined by its size, so more frequencies means more bubbles of different sizes are affected.
Liu hopes that a clinical trial involving the 256-channel ultrasound system could be launched within three years after gaining the support of neurologists. What might help to achieve that goal is a solution to the problem of real-time feedback. “After focused ultrasound energy is delivered to the target position, we can’t make sure if the blood-brain barrier is open. We can only have an answer postoperationally by using contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging technology,” Liu says. His team and others have been looking for possible solutions to the problem.
According to research led by Kullervo Hynynen, senior scientist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, in Toronto, one way to determine if the blood-brain barrier has been breached is to listen for ultraharmonic frequencies emitted by the bubbles. “This signal can be used in a feedback system to control the exposures,” he says.
If researchers can prove that ultrasound can safely open a window into the brain, better drug therapies will likely step through it.
This article originally appeared in print as “Breaching the Blood-Brain Barrier.”

Electromagnetic Depression Treatment Nears Approval...............

Deep transcranial magnetic stimulation adds to psychiatry’s arsenal of electronicremedies.
A new type of brain stimulation device for combating difficult-to-treat cases of major depressive disorder is likely to break into the large American market soon. Its maker, Jerusalem-based Brainsway, plans to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for permission to market the device this month. The move follows initial results from a large-scale trial of the system, in which 30.4 percent of treated patients went into remission and 36.7 percent showed significant improvement. Research into device-based treatments for psychiatric problems has grown rapidly, and if the FDA gives its go-ahead, Brainsway’s system will become the fourth device-based therapy to go on the market since 2005.
Deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), as its name suggests, uses magnetic fields to stimulate activity in structures deep in the brain. The patient wears a helmet in which powerful, specially designed electromagnets have been carefully positioned. When a pulse of electricity flows through the magnets’ coils, the resulting magnetic field induces current to flow through a portion of the brain.
There are subtle differences between deep TMS and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), a brain stimulation tool widely used in research and also marketed as a treatment for depression. The electromagnetic elements in deep TMS are designed to produce a magnetic field that reaches its greatest strength deep within the brain. Ordinarily, magnetic fields fall away quickly inside the brain, but the orientation and structure of the coils in deep TMS lessens that effect. “The concept was to reduce the rate of reduction of the magnetic field as a function of distance,” says Abraham Zangen, coinventor of the technology. In contrast, rTMS typically uses a single coil that produces a tightly focused field just a few centimeters below the brain’s surface.
“The Brainsway coil is more like a shotgun than a rifle,” says Mark S. George, a pioneer of TMS and director of the brain stimulation laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. It’s unclear which weapon will be better at fighting depression. A tightly focused stimulation might be best if researchers knew exactly where to target that stimulation, he says, but they don’t.
The 30.4 percent remission rate Brainsway is claiming may not seem like much, especially when 14.5 percent of patients who underwent a sham procedure also recovered, but in the context of antidepressants it is quite good, according to experts. The patients enrolled in the trial had already been failed by at least one drug treatment, and studies have shown that the odds of success with subsequent drugs decrease. What’s more, as a group the treated patients on average showed a three-point improvement on the Hamilton depression rating scale, which doctors use to evaluate the severity of depression. “If you compared the three points to some antidepressant studies, it’s above average—quite a lot above average,” says U*i Sofer, Brainsway’s CEO. “Some medications are approved and marketed with a 1.5- or 2-point difference in the Hamilton.”
Brainsway executives expect their device to have an easier time with regulators than previous devices did, particularly Neuronetics’ rTMS system, NeuroStar. Although it was ultimately approved, NeuroStar’s initial results were a bit ambiguous, and as the first of its kind, the device suffered from a procedural problem that meant it had to be compared to electroconvulsive therapy. ECT is an inconvenient treatment and can have side effects that scare many patients, but it’s amazingly effective and was a high bar for Neuronetics to hurdle. However, with NeuroStar already on the market, the FDA lowered the bar for Brainsway, and the company is expected to surmount it.
“If these data hold up under peer review, if they are as they seem, then they are unambiguous,” says George.

Amputee Successfully Feels Prosthetic Grip Strength Via Arm Electrodes...............
For decades, amputees have been able to open and close prosthetic hands by twitching muscles and activating a superficial electromyogram (sEMG), but they had no way of feeling what the prosthetic was encountering and little control over the strength of their grasping grip. It was a clunky, incomplete solution.
But recently, an amputee who allowed European researchers to plug electrodes into a bundle of his wrist nerves was able to control the strength of a prosthetic hand's grip and to distinguish the shapes and stiffness of three kinds of objects. The 30-day trial marks a success for one of several new experimental ways of giving amputees a better sense of touch and control over their prosthetics. A different group has conveyed sensations of temperature and vibrations by moving arm nerves into intact muscles of the chest, which act as biological amplifiers of the nerves' tiny signals. Another team tapped into nerves in the lower spine of cats to control their limbs. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is also seeking to improve sensation and control of its advanced prosthetics.
In the latest trial, appearing in Science Translational Medicine today, biomedical engineer Silvestro Micera of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and a large team surgically attached electrodes from a robotic hand to a 36-year-old volunteer's median and ulnar nerves. Those nerves carry sensations that correspond with the volunteer's index finger and thumb, and with his pinky finger and the edge of his hand, respectively. The volunteer controlled the prosthetic with small muscle movements detected by sEMG, a method that dates to the 1970s and measures electrical signals through the skin—unlike the electrodes attached to his nerves, sEMG is not invasive.
"They make an important contribution to show that direct electrical feedback through the peripheral nerve is important for improved control of a prosthetic hand," says biomedical engineer Dustin Tyler of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who is working on other neural prosthetics.
Over the course of seven days, Micera's team asked the volunteer to grasp something with a light grip, a medium grip, and a hard grip. They also asked him to evaluate the shape and stiffness of three kinds of objects. During the 710 tests the volunteer completed, he wore a blindfold and earphones so that he could not use his vision or sound to guide the prosthetic. The researchers also sometimes turned off the sensory feedback to test whether he was just using time to modulate his grip.
The volunteer was able to complete the requested tasks with his prosthetic thumb and index finger 67 percent of the time the first day and 93 percent of the time by the seventh day of the experiment, Micera and colleagues report. He found the pinky finger harder to control: he was only able to accomplish the requested grip 83 percent of the time by the end of the experiment. In both the grip strength tests and in detecting the stiffness of objects, the volunteer made mistakes with the medium setting and object, but he never confused the softest and hardest objects. The ability to modulate his grip strength is this study's main progress over previous work by the same group (as covered in a 2010 Discovery News video and 2014 EPFL video.)
Case Western's Tyler and his colleagues take a different approach: they wrap the median and ulnar nerves, together with the radial nerve, in a cuff. That makes it less invasive, which is beneficial for long-term implants, but may be less precise. Late last year, Tyler's team completed an 18-month trial, as reported Technology Review, and their study is now undergoing peer review. The cuff electrode, which slowly presses the enclosed bundle of nerves until even the inner fibers are available for contact with electrodes, even managed to convey texture sensations. "The human hand is capable of many different sensory perceptions," says Tyler, and he and other groups are trying to convey as many of those as possible.
Biomedical engineering doctoral student Max Ortiz of Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden, who works on prosthetics attached to human bones, says that Micera's method offers promise for fine-tuning prosthetics control. The next step, say both Tyler and Ortiz, is to determine whether the more invasive electrode attachment can endure longer in a larger number of patients. If so, Ortiz says, "we would be happy to use them."

Liquid Metal Reconnects Severed Nerves in Frogs......
Severed nerves in the body can lead to the loss of muscle function and muscle atrophy, unless the severed nerve endings get reconnected. One possible new solution devised by Chinese researchers uses liquid metal to create an electrical conduit capable of transmitting signals between the severed nerve ends.
The liquid metal solution consists of a gallium-indium-tin (GaInSn) alloy that has successfully bridged severed sciatic nerves taken from the calf muscles of bullfrogs, according to Technology Review. A team at Tsinghua University in Beijing showed that the metal alloy—capable of remaining liquid at body temperature and thought to be benign—could transmit nerve signals much more effectively than the commonly-used Ringer's solution meant to mimic the salt mixture in body fluids.
Such a solution could keep the affected muscles active by continuing to transmit nerve signals and prevent muscle loss. That would buy plenty of time for the severed nerve endings to slowly grew back together at the snail's pace of one millimeter per day. The liquid metal idea also presents an alternative to usual methods of suturing together the cut nerve endings if they're close enough together, or as a tool for even more complex nerve transplants.

The Chinese team ran its experiments by snipping the sciatic nerve and the connected muscles from bullfrogs, placing the severed nerve ends and their respective muscles in separate petri dishes, and then testing connecting conduits consisting of either the liquid metal or Ringer's solution. In the liquid metal case, the electroneurographic signal was "virtually similar" to the signal transmitted by an intact sciatic nerve, according to the paper published on 7 April in the arXiv database.
As a bonus, the Chinese researchers found that the liquid metal injected into a bullfrog's calf muscles shows up clearly under x-rays. That would make it easy to locate and remove the liquid metal using a micro-syringe if it no longer became necessary.
A future step might involve using the liquid metal alongside growth factors that encourage nerve regeneration. Tiny microchannels or concentric tubes could contain the liquid metal and growth factors in a complete package for helping to repair severed nerves. But many questions remain about whether the liquid metal solution really does help preserve muscle function in the long term, as well as whether it's truly safe to use inside human bodies.