The early history of tubulation in nerve repair

The first experiments for bridging peripheral nerve gaps using nerve tubulation emerged in the 19th century. Because Gluck (1853-1942) is said to have performed the first animal experiment of nerve tubulation in 1880, it is interesting to explore the background and veracity of this claim. The original documents on nerve tubulation in the 19th century were studied. We conclude that the conduit that was initially used for nerve tubulation was derived from a resorbable decalcified bone tube developed for wound drainage by Neuber (1850-1932) in 1879. Gluck proposed the use of the bone tube as a guided conduit for regenerating nerves in 1881 but stated briefly that his experiments failed because of scar formation. Vanlair (1839-1914) documented the first successful application of nerve tubulation using a bone tube to bridge a 3 cm sciatic nerve defect in a dog in 1882

Functional and morphological assessment of a standardized rat sciatic nerve crush injury with a non-serrated clamp

Peripheral nerve researchers frequently use the rat sciatic nerve crush as a model for axonotmesis.Unfortunately, studies from various research groups report results from different crush techniquesand by using a variety of evaluation tools, making comparisons between studies difficult. The pur-pose of this investigation was to determine the sequence of functional and morphologic changes af-ter an acute sciatic nerve crush injury with a non-serrated clamp, giving a final standardized pres-sure of p9 MPa. Functional recovery was evaluated using the sciatic functional index (SFI), theextensor postural thrust (EPT) and the withdrawal reflex latency (WRL), before injury, and thenat weekly intervals until week 8 postoperatively. The rats were also evaluated preoperatively andat weeks 2, 4, and 8 by ankle kinematics, toe out angle (TOA), and gait-stance duration. In addi-tion, the motor nerve conduction velocity (MNCV) and the gastrocnemius-soleus weight parameterswere measured just before euthanasia. Finally, structural, ultrastructural and histomorphometricanalyses were carried out on regenerated nerve fibers. At 8 weeks after the crush injury, a full func-tional recovery was predicted by SFI, EPT, TOA, and gait-stance duration, while all the other pa-rameters were still recovering their original values. On the other hand, only two of the histomor-phometric parameters of regenerated nerve fibers, namely myelin thickness/axon diameter ratio andfiber/axon diameter ratio, returned to normal values while all other parameters were significantlydifferent from normal values. The employment of traditional methods of functional evaluation inconjunction with the modern techniques of computerized analysis of gait and histomorphometricanalysis should thus be recommended for an overall assessment of recovery in the rat sciatic nervecrush model

Opto-mechanical measurement of micro-trap via nonlinear cavity enhanced Raman scattering spectrum

High-gain resonant nonlinear Raman scattering on trapped cold atoms within a high-fineness ring optical cavity is simply explained under a nonlinear opto-mechanical mechanism, and a proposal using it to detect frequency of micro-trap on atom chip is presented. The enhancement of scattering spectrum is due to a coherent Raman conversion between two different cavity modes mediated by collective vibrations of atoms through nonlinear opto-mechanical couplings. The physical conditions of this technique are roughly estimated on Rubidium atoms, and a simple quantum analysis as well as a multi-body semiclassical simulation on this nonlinear Raman process is conducted.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Information and digital literacies; a review of concepts

A detailed literature reviewing, analysing the multiple and confusing concepts around the ideas of information literacy and digital literacy at the start of the millennium. The article was well-received, and is my most highly-cited work, with over 1100 citations