Comparing scissors and scalpels to a novel surgical instrument: a biomechanical sectioning study.

Background: This study introduces a novel surgical instrument to reduce iatrogenic nerve injuries during procedures such as carpal tunnel and ulnar nerve decompression surgery. These injuries often result from direct damage to surrounding tissues by surgical instruments, whose designs have remained largely unchanged over the past decades. The novel device is a modified surgical forceps that has a deployable surgical scalpel that runs along a groove on the forceps.

Design and validation of a thermoreversible material for percutaneous tissue hydrodissection.

Interventional oncology procedures such as thermal ablation are becoming routine for many cancers. Hydrodissection-separating tissues with fluids-protects tissues near the treatment zone to improve ablation's safety and facilitate more aggressive treatments. However, currently used fluids such as normal saline and 5% dextrose in water (D5W) migrate in the peritoneum, reducing their protective efficacy.

Automation of three-dimensional cell culture in arrayed microfluidic devices.

The increasing interest in studying the interactions between cells and the extracellular matrix (ECM) has created a need for high throughput low-cost three-dimensional (3D) culture systems. The recent development of tubeless microfluidics via passive pumping provides a high throughput microchannel culture platform compatible with existing high throughput infrastructures (e.g.

Expanding the available assays: adapting and validating In-Cell Westerns in microfluidic devices for cell-based assays.

Microfluidic methods for cellular studies can significantly reduce costs due to reduced reagent and biological specimen requirements compared with many traditional culture techniques. However, current types of readouts are limited and this lack of suitable readouts for microfluidic cultures has significantly hindered the application of microfluidics for cell-based assays. The In-Cell Western (ICW) technique uses quantitative immunocytochemistry and a laser scanner to provide an in situ measure of protein quantities in cells grown in microfluidic channels of arbitrary geometries.

Automated high-throughput microchannel assays for cell biology: Operational optimization and characterization.

Screening biological readouts in cell culture are increasing in frequency and throughput. In such assays, cell types may be rare and reagents or compounds may be expensive often resulting in a reduced number of conditions and/or replicates. "Tubeless" microfluidics offers a method to reduce this burden, as has been previously shown.