BACKGROUND A clear understanding of the blood vessels in the eye is helpful in the diagnosis and treatment of ophthalmic diseases, such as glaucoma. Conventional techniques such as micro-CT imaging and histology are not sufficiently accurate to identify the vessels in the eye, because their diameter is just a few microns. The newly developed medical imaging technology, X-ray phase-contrast imag...

The endothelium from different vascular beds exhibits a high degree of phenotypic heterogeneity. Endothelial cells (EC) can be harvested easily from large vessels by mechanical removal or collagenase digestion. In particular, the human umbilical vein has been used due to its wide availability, and the study of ECs derived from it has undoubtedly greatly advanced our knowledge of vascular biolog...

Occlusions of the retinal veins and arteries, associated with diseases such as hypertension and arteriosclerosis, are a major cause of severe and irreversible loss of vision. Treatments for retinal vascular diseases have been unsatisfactory owing in part to the difficulty of delivering drugs to the site of disease within the eye. In this article, we demonstrate that a new device, the vapor bubb...

Hydrogels designed to sustainably release bioactive molecules are extensively used to enhance tissue repair and regenerative therapies. Along this line, numerous efforts are made to control the molecular release rate and amount. In contrast, few efforts are made to control the molecular release pattern, and, subsequently, modulate the spatial organization of newly forming tissues, including blo...

RETINAL micro-aneurysms were observed histologically by Mackenzie and Nettleship as early as 1879. However, these observations passed unnoticed until 1943 when Ballantyne and Loewenstein found numerous spherical micro-aneurysms on the capillaries in flat histological sections of retinae from diabetics. These microaneurysms were conceived to be the histological substrate for the small sanguinole...

We introduce an integer programming-based approach to vessel network extraction that enforces global physiological constraints on the vessel structure and learn this prior from a high-resolution reference network. The method accounts for both image evidence and geometric relationships between vessels by formulating and solving an integer programming problem. Starting from an over-connected netw...

The increased application of the da Vinci robotic platform (Intuitive Surgical Inc.) for microsurgery has led to the development of new adjunctive surgical instrumentation. In microsurgery, the robotic platform can provide high definition 12×-15× digital magnification, broader range of motion, fine instrument handling with decreased tremor, reduced surgeon fatigue, and improved surgical product...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE The objective of this article is to quantify the effect of hyper-osmotic agent (glycerol) on blood velocity in hamster skin blood vessels measured with a dynamic imaging technique, laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI). STUDY DESIGN/MATERIALS AND METHODS In this study a dorsal skin-flap window was implanted on the hamster skin. The hyper-osmotic drug, that is, glycero...

Thumb has a critical role in the hand function. It is the most important digit for pinching and grasping. Therefore, thumb amputation demands its replantation or reconstruction to restore the hand functions. A case of hand injury which involved multiple digits along with amputation of thumb is reported. The thumb had amputation level just distal to Metacarpophalangeal joint (MPj) along with amp...

BACKGROUND The yeast forms of Blastomyces dermatitidis usually range from 8 to 15-20 micro m in diameter. Larger yeast forms have previously been reported only twice in immunosuppressed patients. In both patients these large forms were seen within the lung. CASE REPORT We present a 14-year-old cardiac transplant patient, who presented 36 days following his transplantation with acute respirato...