We developed an alternative approach to teach diabetes mellitus in our practical classes, replacing laboratory animals. We used custom rats made of cloth, which have a ventral zipper that allows stuffing with glass marbles to reach different weights. Three mock rats per group were placed into metabolic cages with real food and water and with test tubes containing artificial urine, simulating a ...

1. Artificial heart valves have been in use for over five decades to replace diseased heart valves. Since the first heart valve replacement performed with a caged-ball valve, more than 50 valve designs have been developed, differing principally in valve geometry, number of leaflets and material. To date, all artificial heart valves are plagued with complications associated with haemolysis, coag...

Triatoma infestans (Klug, 1834) (Hemiptera: Reduviidae), the main vector of Chagas disease in South America, feeds primarily on humans, but ethical reasons preclude carrying out demographical studies using people. Thus, most laboratory studies of T. infestans are conducted using bird or mammal live hosts that may result in different demographic parameters from those obtained on human blood. The...

A novel design of a blood cleaner on-chip using an optical waveguide known as a PANDA ring resonator is proposed. By controlling some suitable parameters, the optical vortices (gradient optical fields/wells) can be generated and used to form the trapping tools in the same way as optical tweezers. In operation, the trapping force is formed by the combination between the gradient field and scatte...

LVAD is a mechanical pump supporting a weak heart function and blood flow. Sometimes, the heart may not recover fast enough to take over the pumping action immediately after surgery, in such patients a temporary support device has been employed to maintain the pumping action until the patient’s own heart recovers. This device can be considered as a temporary alternative before the process of ar...