Restoration of grasping in an upper limb amputee using the myokinetic prosthesis with implanted magnets.

The loss of a hand disrupts the sophisticated neural pathways between the brain and the hand, severely affecting the level of independence of the patient and the ability to carry out daily work and social activities. Recent years have witnessed a rapid evolution of surgical techniques and technologies aimed at restoring dexterous motor functions akin to those of the human hand through bionic solutions, mainly relying on probing of electrical signals from the residual nerves and muscles. Here, we report the clinical implementation of an interface aimed at achieving this goal by exploiting muscle deformation, sensed through passive magnetic implants: the myokinetic interface.

Surviving the Storm: Challenges of Bladder Cancer Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Purpose: To evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the care of patients with bladder cancer in a tertiary oncology center.

Materials And Method: We performed a retrospective analysis of patients admitted to a tertiary cancer center for the treatment of bladder cancer between 2019 and 2022. Surgical volumes, patient demographics, clinical characteristics, and postoperative outcomes were compared across these years.

Exact and Computationally Robust Solutions for Cylindrical Magnets Systems with Programmable Magnetization.

Magnetic systems based on permanent magnets are receiving growing attention, in particular for micro/millirobotics and biomedical applications. Their design landscape is expanded by the possibility to program magnetization, yet enabling analytical results, crucial for containing computational costs, are lacking. The dipole approximation is systematically used (and often strained), because exact and computationally robust solutions are to be unveiled even for common geometries such as cylindrical magnets, which are ubiquitously used in fundamental research and applications.

Knowledge assessment among subjects with chronic venous leg ulcer in outpatient setting: Translation and adaptation of a tool to identify subjects at risk of poor understanding.

Promotion of self-care is an important issue in the treatment of chronic diseases such as venous leg ulcers, as adequate self-care can prevent complications and ulcer recurrence. However, only a few tools have been developed and tested to assess the knowledge of patients with venous leg ulcers. This study aimed to translate, adapt and validate in an Italian language and context a questionnaire to assess the knowledge of patients with venous leg ulcers about their disease (pathophysiology, risk factors, lifestyle changes due to ulcer) and the proper management of the ulcer to prevent recurrence.

Looking for Synergies in Healthy Upper Limb Motion: A Focus on the Wrist.

Recent studies on human upper limb motion highlighted the benefit of dimensionality reduction techniques to extrapolate informative joint patterns. These techniques can simplify the description of upper limb kinematics in physiological conditions, serving as a baseline for the objective assessment of movement alterations, or to be implemented in a robotic joint. However, the successful description of kinematic data requires a proper alignment of the acquisitions to correctly estimate kinematic patterns and their motion variability.