Implants & Prosthetics

Engineers in the School of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, are developing a new family of replacement heart valves made from synthetic materials that, they say, will be superior to current mechanical and tissue-based...

Here is the latest batch of news from the medical products community. Please click the link for more.

A team of scientists from Graz University of Technology, Austria, together with colleagues from the Medical University of Graz, Vienna University of Technology, and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, are developing absorbable implants to promote bone healing that can be broken down...

Implanted medical devices like defibrillators and insulin pumps now include wireless connections to let doctors or technicians update software or download data—but such improvements could open the door to life-threatening wireless attacks. Security researchers have shown that they can...

The Medical Imaging & Technology Alliance, the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) and the Medical Device Manufacturers Association announced in July that medical device manufacturers have now paid $1 billion to the Internal Revenue Service for the medical device excise tax. Their...

A team of researchers at The Pennsylvania State University Applied Research Laboratory (ARL) and Materials Science Department, University Park, have seen the Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) minimally invasive heart pump they developed between 2005 and 2011 transitioned to its first...

New research conducted by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, reported online in the Journal of Vascular Surgery, suggests that people who undergo minimally invasive placement of stents to open clogged leg arteries are significantly less likely than those who have...

Engineers at The Ohio State University, Columbus, discovered that bone cells grow and reproduce faster on a textured surface than on a smooth one—and grow best when they can cling to a microscopic "shag carpet" made of tiny metal oxide wires. The discovery could someday help broken bones and joint...

A team of engineers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, found that networks of spherical nanoparticles embedded in elastic materials could make the best stretchy conductors. Flexible electronics have a wide variety of possibilities, they say, from bendable displays and batteries to medical implants that...

Researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK say that their MXL project, which uses computational modeling to define the mechanics of an artificial joint, will enable surgeons to ensure successful surgery and fit joint replacements with longer, optimized lifespans. Using a complex interaction...

Dr. Albert Chi, a 2003 graduate of the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, and a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, MD, is part of a team of engineers and surgeons developing a Modular Prosthetic Limb—a robotic arm and hand that a person can control using their thoughts....

Human hearts from the potential donors that had been deemed unsuitable for transplantation could get a second chance to save a life, say a team of researchers at the University of Sunderland in collaboration with Newcastle University, both in the UK. The scientists are working to restart hearts and develop tests to prove...

A team of scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, say that using tiny gold particles and resin they have discovered how to make a new kind of flexible sensor that could some day be integrated into electronic skin (e-skin). They say that this e-skin, when attached to prosthetic...