Category Health/Medical

Pearls have long been favored as objects of beauty. Now, Purdue University innovators are using the gem to provide potential new opportunities for spectral information processing that can be applied to spectroscopy in biomedical and military applications.

The Purdue team demonstrated light transport-assisted information processing by creating a pearl spectrometer.

Spectrometers probe interactions of matter and light as a function of the electromagnetic spectrum and are commonly used in biomedical and military applications. For example, they have been used for diagnostics of various types of cancer and for military gas sensing.

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A novel outpatient procedure offers lasting pain relief for patients suffering from moderate to severe arthritis in their hip and shoulder joints, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Researchers said the procedure could help reduce reliance on addictive opiates.

People with moderate to severe pain related to osteoarthritis face limited treatment options. Common approaches like injections of anesthetic and corticosteroids into the affected joints grow less effective as the arthritis progresses and worsens.

“Usually, over time patients become less responsive to these injections,” said Felix M. Gonzalez, M.D., from the Radiology Department at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia...

A single, daily pill combining blood pressure and cholesterol medications, along with the addition of a daily dose of aspirin, reduced cardiovascular disease events in people at risk for heart disease, according to late-breaking research presented today in a late-breaking clinical trial presentation at ...

Certain parts of our body, such as the skin or liver, can repair themselves after a damage. For the past 30 years, scientists have been investigating the regenerative potential of beta cells, pancreatic cells in charge of the production of insulin. Beta-cell population is indeed partially destroyed when diabetes occurs, and regenerating these cells represents an outstanding clinical challenge.

By studying diabetic mice, scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG, observed that this regeneration mechanism was under the influence of circadian rhythms — the molecular clocks regulatin...