Kennesaw State University’s Lei Shi, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the Southern Polytechnic College of Engineering and Engineering Technology, is working to change how doctors diagnose and treat gastrointestinal disorders with virtual replicas of human stomachs.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS) in Japan have discovered why smoking tobacco helps people suffering from ulcerative colitis, a chronic disease typified by inflammation of the large intestine. The study shows that smoking produces metabolites that encourage bacteria from the mouth to grow in the large intestines where they trigger an immune response that suppresses the inflammation. These findings imply that protection against ulcerative colitis can be achieved through prebiotics like hydroquinone or probiotic therapy with bacteria like Streptococcus mitis, thus eliminating the need to smoke and all the associated risks for other diseases.

Researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and other North American institutions, have provided the first technical description for using focused ultrasound to reliably open the blood-brain barrier. The findings, recently published in Device, pave the way for expanding the use of this experimental device to open the blood-brain barrier to improve treatments and diagnostics for patients with brain tumors and other neurological disorders.