Studies have been conducted to highlight the anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive properties of synthetic cannabinoids as well as their potential for cartilage repair. Various wound healing techniques can be used to investigate the mechanisms of chondrocyte repair in monolayers or three dimensional tissues constructs. In this work the effect of WIN55, 212-2 (WIN-2) on nitric oxide (NO) and matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) expressed by wounded chondrocyte monolayers was investigated. Moreover, expression of collagen type-I and type-II, fibronectin and S100 proteins were detected using immunofluorescence and quantitatively verified using ELISA based techniques following treatment with 1 µM and 2 µM of WIN-2. Treating chondrocytes with 1 µM of WIN-2 significantly increased expression of collagen type-II, fibronectin and S100, and significantly reduced collagen type-I expressions as compared to the control groups. On the other hand, both concentrations of WIN-2 significantly reduced the expression of the inflammation markers NO and MMP-2 in a dose dependent manner. These findings highlight the potential use of the synthetic cannabinoids for improving cartilage healing properties as well as acting as an anti-inflammatory agent which could be used to enhance tissue engineering protocols aimed at cartilage repair.

This research explores the uses of natural materials in personal hygiene applications. In order to maximize the use of materials for personal hygiene, they must be absorbent, but should also be biodegradable to minimize their impact on the environment. Rice was prepared for testing by increase the porosity. The material was ground into three size distributions and tested to determine its ability to absorb moisture under both ambient and body temperatures. Research goals address the percentage of moisture absorbed by weight, the absorption as a function of temperature, and the optimal particle size required for the selected application. Results indicate that the amount of moisture absorbed by the material increases as the temperature approaches body temperature. Furthermore, the time required for the material to reach equilibrium, as also defined by the amount at which the material will no longer absorb moisture, varies by particle size.

Accurate segmentation of glioma from Magnetic Resonance (MR) imagery undoubtedly provides essential assistance for glioma resection and following progress evaluation after the resection. Numerous methods have been presented to segment glioma from Two Dimensional (2D) or Three Dimensional (3D) MR images. To deal with the complex structure of brain and the various shapes of glioma, methods based on selecting asymmetric areas with respect to the approximate symmetry of brain are widely used. This kind of methods, however, may fail in the case of segmenting the glioma across the mid-sagittal plane. This paper developed a fully 3D automatic asymmetry detection method for the glioma segmentation, while overcoming the location limitation in conventional asymmetry detection methods. The proposed 3D bounding box method locates glioma in the Voxel of Interest (VOI), which is checked and corrected by the reflectional method. With the accurate VOI, the improved 3D GrowCut method is employed to segment glioma automatically and quickly. We evaluated the accuracy of the proposed method by using both synthetic and real clinical MR image data. Experimental results show that our method conquers the difficulties of conventional asymmetry detection method when segmenting the glioma across the mid-sagittal plane successfully. Our method provides similar segmentation performance with manual segmentation and shows obvious higher efficiency and more convenience than 2D automatic segmentation method.

The two images below represent the carbuncle on the 15th day of disease (the 8th day of hospitalization) of the 48 year-old patient from Republic of Moldova that accidentally injured himself while slaughtering three sick lambs.

One of the major challenges faced during non-invasive treatment and surgery of tumours or cancers in abdominal organs such as the liver, lungs or kidneys is the continuous movement due to physiological processes. This motion creates the need for comprehensive treatment planning in order to understand the target movement, compute the relative motion of the energy delivery system and compensate for the motion during image-guided robotic surgery. Without correct motion estimation, the target volume may suffer from inaccurate dosage delivery and/or adverse effects on the surrounding healthy tissue. A number of approaches have been proposed to deal with motion tracking. A succinct review of the methods used in the motion estimation and management of moving target volumes in the major abdominal organs, such as lungs, liver and kidney, are presented in this paper.