TECH DAYS ROBOTEX

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Andrea Collo

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Les journées techniques 2014 des Robotex TechDays auront lieu à Grenoble les 3 et 4 avril 2014. La participation n’est pas limitée aux seuls membres du réseau Robotex, ces journées sont ouvertes à tous : industriel, ingénieur, technicien ou doctorant, ainsi qu’aux chercheurs intéressés par les aspects techniques.

L’objectif premier de ces ateliers organisés par le réseau Robotex est de réunir annuellement l’ensemble des personnels ingénieurs et techniciens assurant la gestion de plateformes de développement et d’expérimentation de systèmes robotiques sur le territoire national. Les différentes plateformes du réseau Robotex portent sur un large spectre de la robotique : la robotique de production, la robotique mobile terrestre et aérienne, la robotique médicale, la micro-nano robotique, la robotique humanoïde et les interactions naturelles homme / robot. Des sessions transverses sont aussi proposées : une session dédiée aux Fablab et leurs retours d’expérience, une session dédiée à des présentations d’industriels, et une session “speed-demo” avec des vidéos courtes.

Les inscriptions sont possible jusqu’au 28 mars, via cette page . Le site de l’événement, ainsi que le programme en cours de finalisation, est accessible en cliquant ici ou sur l’image ci-dessous.

Printing a human kidney

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Andrea Collo

Surgeon Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday solve the organ-donor problem: a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney.

official TED Conference – filmed March 2011

There’s actually a major health crisis today in terms of the shortage of organs. The fact is that we’re living longer. Medicine has done a much better job of making us live longer, and the problem is, as we age, our organs tend to fail more, and so currently there are not enough organs to go around. In fact, in the last 10 years, the number of patients requiring an organ has doubled, while in the same time, the actual number of transplants has barely gone up. So this is now a public health crisis. So that’s where this field comes in that we call the field of regenerative medicine. It really involves many different areas. You can use, actually, scaffolds, biomaterials — they’re like the piece of your blouse or your shirt — but specific materials you can actually implant in patients and they will do well and help you regenerate. Or we can use cells alone, either your very own cells or different stem cell populations. Or we can use both. We can use, actually, biomaterials and the cells together. And that’s where the field is today.

Our biggest challenge are the solid organs. I don’t know if you realize this, but 90 percent of the patients on the transplant list are actually waiting for a kidney. Patients are dying every day because we don’t have enough of those organs to go around. So this is more challenging — large organ, vascular, a lot of blood vessel supply, a lot of cells present. So the strategy here is — this is actually a CT scan, an X-ray — and we go layer by layer, using computerized morphometric imaging analysis and 3D reconstruction to get right down to those patient’s own kidneys. We then are able to actually image those, do 360 degree rotation to analyze the kidney in its full volumetric characteristics, and we then are able to actually take this information and then scan this in a printing computerized form. So we go layer by layer through the organ, analyzing each layer as we go through the organ, and we then are able to send that information through the computer and actually design the organ for the patient.

click here for the full transcript of the video

Human Cartilage can be 3D-printed

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Andrea Collo

We’ve already discussed about the importance of cartilages in the human body. Two examples are the knee menisci and the thyroid cartilage that origins the Adam’s apple. We’ve also understood that 3D printing would probably represent a great revolution in the world of medicine, with the possibility of reproducing human body parts or fabricating new-generation assistive tools. Put the two things together and you’ll be able to print human cartilage by means of a 3D printer. I simply copy-paste here the content of this interesting webpage (to which all rights belong).

Dr. Darryl D’Lima and the members of his team at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California, say they’ve unlocked the secrets of bioprinting human cartilage. That’s big news as the current best practice medical technique to replace lost cartilage is implantation of an artificial joint. Even though that sort of operation is painful, requires a long stretch of rehabilitation and artificial joints can often need replacement as time goes on, such procedures are the industry standard.

dr-darryl-dlima-bioprinting-cartilage The global market for knee replacements amounts to nearly $7 billion annually, and experts say it will climb to nearly $11 billion within the next few years. Somewhere around 773,000 Americans have a hip or knee replaced each year. That’s big business and a lot of pain. But D’Lima says the design of his latest prototype bioprinter will print living cartilage, and that would mark a great leap forward for those suffering from painful knee and joint damage. Taking a Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer as his starting point, D’Lima says his bioprinter uses cartilage progenitor cells suspended in a biocompatible liquid. Once the solution is exposed to ultraviolet light, it takes a permanent shape.

The extremely tiny drops of material provide other benefits as well. Measuring just one picoliter in diameter (or one-billionth of a liter), the droplets output by the bioprinter are compact enough to fill microscopic pits on the surface of cartilage or bone. “It would be the equivalent of filling a pothole,” D’Lima says. “It would automatically fill the defect as you’re printing it. You’re getting a fairly good mechanical integration into the tissue, which is very difficult for us to do when we do traditional transplants.”

Patients suffering with arthritis or knee injuries are often plagued by a lack of cartilage. That means bones begin to grind against bones, and that means extreme pain and constant discomfort for patients. Using D’Lima’s bioprinting method, cartilage can be applied directly into the knee joint to provide a custom fit impossible to achieve by cutting pre-made cartilage to the particular patient. And one day, D’Lima says he’s confident that the process will involve printing the cartilage material directly onto a patient on the operating table. “We wouldn’t have to prepare (material) in advance,” D’Lima said. “All of this would be done on the day of surgery, on demand.”

knee-worn-cart The major hurdle, according to D’Lima, is that as there’s currently no printer which can print directly onto a patient. His technique needs some refining. D’Lima says he’s working on those tweaks now with biotech firms Invetech and Organovo. And D’Lima also says he’s certain the method will work in practice as cartilage, due to its simpler cellular structure and lack of a complicated network of blood vessels, will be less challenging to create than some other tissues. Cartilage, flexible connective tissue found in various areas of the body, is not as rigid as bone but can be stiffer and less flexible than muscle. Composed of specialized cells called Chondrocytes, cartilage (unlike other connective tissues) doesn’t contain blood vessels. The chondrocytes are supplied with nutrients by diffusion as a result of the pumping action generated by compression, so in comparison with other connective tissues, cartilage grows and repairs much more slowly. “(Cartilage) is complex enough that you need technology like 3D printing, but at the same time, it’s not so complex that it’s extremely challenging,” he said. “We’ve gotten interest from other researchers, wanting to print retinal cells. The retina has some similarities to cartilage in that the photoreceptors and the neural cells of the retina don’t require a blood supply, so we don’t have to print microvasculature. And the retina is a mature tissue in that if you lose a photoreceptor, that’s it. You don’t grow a new one. So it’s fairly attractive for 3D printing.”

EMBC 2014 , EORS 2014

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Andrea Collo

EMBC 2014

The 36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC’14) will be held from August 26-30, 2014 at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers, Chicago, Illinois, USA. The overall theme of the conference is “Discovering, Innovating, and Engineering Future Biomedicine.” It will cover diverse topics from cutting-edge biomedical and healthcare technology research and development, clinical applications, to biomedical education. The conference program will consist of high-profile plenary/keynote lectures, symposia, workshops, invited sessions, oral and poster sessions, and exhibitions. All papers will be peer reviewed; accepted full-length (4 page) papers will appear in the Conference Proceedings and be indexed by IEEE Xplore and Medline/PubMed.

Submission Deadlines

Session proposal submission deadline: 2/17/2014
Paper submission deadline for 4 page papers: 3/17/2014
Opening date for 1 page papers: 3/31/2014
Accept/Reject notification date for 4 page papers: 6/2/2014
Final 4 page paper submission date: 6/9/2014
Paper submission deadline for 1 page papers: 6/23/2014
Accept/Reject notification date for 1 page papers: 6/23/2014
Final 1 page paper submission open date: 6/23/2014
Final 1 page paper submission deadline date: 6/30/2014

EORS 2014

The 22nd annual meeting of the European Orthopaedic Research Society (EORS 2014) will be held from July 2-14, 2014 at the La Cité Nantes Events Center, Nantes, FRANCE. EORS 2014 will gather personalities from both the medical community and industry partners, to discuss about themes such as biomechanics, biomaterials, regenerative medicine, orthopaedic and traumatology preclinical models, as well as next generation orthopaedic research.