Cordless-Microscope

A phase II trial was started in Japan to evaluate the safety of laparoscopy-assisted distal gastrectomy (LADG) for clinical stage I gastric cancer. A total of 170 patients will be enrolled in this study by expert surgeons for laparoscopy from 16 institutions over 1 year. The primary endpoint is incidence of anastomotic leak and pancreatic fistula. The secondary endpoints are overall survival, relapse-free survival, proportion of completion of LADG, proportion of conversion from LADG to open gastrectomy, surgical morbidity and short-term clinical outcomes.

Scaphoid fractures have the highest prevalence of non-union in the human body, but little is known about the osteogenic potential of cells at the pseudoarthrosis. It was our goal to determine whether cells isolated from non-unions could be stimulated to differentiate into osteoblasts and produce bone in vitro. Fifteen human scaphoid non-unions were excised during surgery and bone from either side of the non-union and the fibrocartilagenous central regions were harvested. Osteoblastic populations were subcultured from these. The number of bone nodules (colonies of osteoblast cells that produced bone) from all three regions was similar to the number of nodules derived from iliac bone cultures from the same patients. Treatment of cells with rhBMP-2 resulted in a 3- to 10-fold increase in bone nodule formation in vitro from cells derived from the non-unions. These data demonstrate that cells at the pseudoarthrosis have osteogenic capability and can be stimulated by rhBMP-2, possibly increasing the ability to heal.

Zero-loss imaging of frozen-hydrated specimens requires a detector with high sensitivity, a low noise level and high spatial resolution, because more electrons are scattered inelastically than elastically by cryo-specimens and the number of electrons detected is ~1/4 of incident electrons after energy filtering. Cameras using charge-coupled devices (CCDs) are good candidates due to their high sensitivity. They have been used mainly to record electron diffraction patterns for electron crystallography due to their limited spatial resolution but recently used for acquiring direct images due to their convenience. The spatial resolution has been limited by the characteristics of a phosphor that is necessary to convert high-energy electrons to photons and the coupling. We adopted a CsI scintillator with good modulation transfer function (MTF), which was epitaxially grown from each of optical fibres. The stripes of carbon graphite with 3.4 Å spacing and 1.4 Å stripes of gold thin crystals could be recorded with a magnification of 240 000x and 560 000x at 200 kV, respectively. A computed Fourier transform of an image of a frozen-hydrated crystal of catalase containing about 1000 units showed diffraction spots at spatial frequencies of 1/9.6 Å^–1 up to 1/8 Å^–1 without background subtraction, when the image was recorded at 140 000x. These results show that the resolution of the developed camera was good enough to record images. Our used test method for MTF determination may be useful for others.