Status and prospects of liver cirrhosis treatment by using bone marrow-derived cells and mesenchymal cells

In 2003, we started autologous bone marrow cell infusion (ABMi) therapy for treating liver cirrhosis. ABMi therapy uses 400 mL of autologous bone marrow obtained under general anesthesia and infused mononuclear cells from the peripheral vein. The clinical study expanded and we treated liver cirrhosis induced by HCV and HBV infection and alcohol consumption. We found that the ABMi therapy was effective for cirrhosis patients and now we are treating patients with combined HIV and HCV infection and with metabolic syndrome-induced liver cirrhosis. Currently, to substantiate our findings that liver cirrhosis can be successfully treated by the ABMi therapy, we are conducting randomized multicenter clinical studies designated "Advanced medical technology B" for HCV-related liver cirrhosis in Japan. On the basis of our clinical study, we developed a proof-of-concept showing that infusion of bone marrow cells (BMCs) improved liver fibrosis and sequentially activated proliferation of hepatic progenitor cells and hepatocytes, further promoting restoration of liver functions. To treat patients with severe forms of liver cirrhosis, we continued translational research to develop less invasive therapies by using mesenchymal stem cells derived from bone marrow. We obtained a small quantity of BMCs under local anesthesia and expanded them into mesenchymal stem cells that will then be used for treating cirrhosis. In this review, we present our strategy to apply the results of our laboratory research to clinical studies. Copyright © 2014, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc

Three-dimensional transient electromagnetic modeling in the Laplace Domain

In modeling electromagnetic responses, Maxwell's equations in the frequency domain are popular and have been widely used (Nabighian, 1994; Newman and Alumbaugh, 1995; Smith, 1996, to list a few). Recently, electromagnetic modeling in the time domain using the finite difference (FDTD) method (Wang and Hohmann, 1993) has also been used to study transient electromagnetic interactions in the conductive medium. This paper presents a new technique to compute the electromagnetic response of three-dimensional (3-D) structures. The proposed new method is based on transforming Maxwell's equations to the Laplace domain. For each discrete Laplace variable, Maxwell's equations are discretized in 3-D using the staggered grid and the finite difference method (FDM). The resulting system of equations is then solved for the fields using the incomplete Cholesky conjugate gradient (ICCG) method. The new method is particularly effective in saving computer memory since all the operations are carried out in real numbers. For the same reason, the computing speed is faster than frequency domain modeling. The proposed approach can be an extremely useful tool in developing an inversion algorithm using the time domain data