Hasta La Gadget!

A neuroscientist has made a medical breakthrough by restoring vision to blind mice. The researcher has provided hope to millions of people around the world without sight. The researcher is Doctor Sheila Nirenberg, and her research has enabled the mice to see well enough to track squirrels and distinguish a baby’s face. In a bid to grab Sheldon Cooper’s heart, Nirenberg envisions a day when blind people will wear Geordi La Forge visors.

The technique the New York-based neuroscientist has come up with is non-surgical and uses high-tech glasses embedded with tiny video camera and a computer chip to restore sight. She believes that the technique could be tested on humans within two years. The special glasses could restore sight to millions of people around the world suffering from blindness due to degenerative eye diseases.

The scientist says that this type of blindness is often caused by diseases that damage certain parts of the retina used by the eye to detect light and the neural pathways that attach to the retina. However, the cells within the retina that communicate with the brain, called ganglion cells, are typically left intact. The technique bypasses those damage cells and sends the encoded visual information directly to the brain.

The breakthrough in the technique came after Nirenberg was able to decipher the code of neural pulses that the mouse brain forms into images. Nirenberg uses a two-path approach that includes a prosthetic device that produces the code plus gene therapy that activates the ganglion cells. She said, “It’s just an injection into the eye.”

The code needed was placed onto a chip and combined with a mini projector. The chip converts the images into electrical impulses and then the projector transforms those pulses into light that is able stimulate proteins inside the ganglion cells. The information travels up to the brain where the brain recognizes the data as a sharp image. One key factor giving hope that this could be used to treat human blindness is that Nirenberg has worked out the code needed for a monkey retina, which is almost identical to the human retina.

[via NY Daily News]

Neuroscientist restores sight to blind mice using Star Trek tech is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Fasotec and Hiroo Ladies clinic, have started a service that makes 3D models showing the inside of the abdomen during pregnancy. This service began on July 30.
Currently, many clinics provide photos taken during ultrasound scans. But this is the world’s first service to provide a 3D model that you can actually hold.
“We actually got three expectant mothers to try this out. They said it felt great to see how their babies looked before birth, and to be able to actually hold the inside …

Don’t get us wrong, we adore 3D printers and the whole additive manufacturing movement. But, if all you’re going to get out of the ABS-jets are some companion cubes and a raptor claw, well then, we don’t think there’s much hope for the technology. Thankfully there are people out there (much better people than us, we might add), who have turned to 3D printers to actually improve peoples lives. Take, for example, the tale of two-year-old Emma, born with the congenital disorder arthrogryposis multiplex congenita (AMC). The disease causes a person’s joints to become locked in a single position, in Emma’s case, it was her arms. There are prosthetics that can help, but most are made of metal — including the anchor vest — which would make them too heavy for a 25-pound girl.

Instead of going off the shelf, doctors turned to a 3D printer from Stratasys to create custom molded parts and a lightweight vest for Emma. The result: the two-year-old who once could not lift her arms is now able to play, color and feed herself. Printing the parts also solves another major issue — Emma is growing… quickly. The adorable tot has already outgrown her first vest, but her mother just calls the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children and has a new one made. The same goes for replacement parts. Should a hinge or brace break, it need only be a matter of hours (not days or weeks) before a new one is delivered. For more details check out the heartwarming video after the break.

Continue reading 3D printed ‘Magic Arms’ give a little girl use of her limbs

Filed under: Science

3D printed ‘Magic Arms’ give a little girl use of her limbs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Aug 2012 11:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Puttone Rehabilitation Device that was the handiwork of the Chiba University Graduate School and Faculty of Engineering will be able to emit sound depending on tilt direction and angle. Apart from that, you can also hook up this particular device to a range of everyday items in order to turn them into rehabilitation tools that work great for patients with unilateral paralysis. The Puttone Rehabilitation Device has been described to come with “an acceleration sensor, and the acceleration value is read by a PC. A program running on the PC generates the sound. The difficult part was determining how simple to make it; healthy people feel that it would be more fun if it could be made more complex to do a lot of things. For patients suffering from unilateral paralysis, the degree of difficulty depends on their particular symptoms. So, it was very difficult to decide how simple to make it so that it would be fun and appropriate for people with a variety of symptoms.”

A USB cable will send power to the Arduino general-purpose microcontroller so that the Puttone device will run just fine whenever it is connected. Right now, this device is hooked up to a PC to generate the sound, and the future might see this small Puttone unit carry both sensors as well as a system to generate sound.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: BiOM helps amputees walk properly , 3D Printed Arms help give little girl a new lease of life,

Check out the video above that depicts a little girl known as Emma, where this 2-year old girl was born with a rare disease known as arthrogryposis, and this particular condition actually makes it impossible for her to raise her arms without any external assistance. Thanks to the clever use of 3D printing, a hospital in Delaware managed to come up with a mobile plastic exoskeleton which enables Emma to make use of her arms in different ways.

Another big advantage of 3D printing would being able to come up with a brand new exoskeleton each time Emma outgrows it. Alternatively, it can also be printed again should the printed arm break, how now about that? Emma calls her device “magic arms.” The Stratasys 3D printer was instrumental in the creation of Emma’s jacket that holds her 3D printed arms as well. Making a 3D printed prosthesis sounds a whole lot better than churning out 3D printed assault rifles, right?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: 3D printer does faux blood vessels, Qualcomm OpenGL driver turns 2D games into 3D,