A team led by researchers at the Institute of Bioelectronic Medicine at The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, the research division of New York’s Northwell Health, developed a long-term implant model for vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) in mice that enables study of bioelectronics in chronic disease. The research was published in Elife, with a full description of the surgical technique and methods for calibrating the stimulation dose to enable other labs to use the methods to advance bioelectronic medicine.

TORONTO – For Scott Kadwell, president of Markham, Ontario-based RSK Medical Inc., the distributor tagged to sell the Health Canada approved Gammacore Sapphire, the device represents “a shift from a business to business to a direct-to-consumer business model.” For Rockaway, N.J.’s Electrocore Inc. which developed the self-administered technology, it’s one more regulator to have greenlighted the FDA cleared, CE-marked device for treating intractable migraine and cluster headache.

HONG KONG – A professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) claims that retinal eye scanning can help to improve early detection of autism and treatment outcomes for children. Benny Zee, a professor at CUHK, has developed a method to identify children at risk of autism and get them into treatment programs sooner.

LONDON – The largest study to date, involving 236,379 confirmed cases, shows that 1 in 3 survivors of COVID-19 was diagnosed with a neurological or psychiatric condition within six months of contracting the infection. For 13% of those patients, it was their first such diagnosis.

Vysioneer Inc. has won the FDA’s nod for its Vbrain artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tumor autocontouring software. The company said Vbrain is the first AI device to receive FDA clearance for tumor autocontouring in radiation therapy. Vbrain is a neural network-based AI solution, trained from clinical data.

Nevro Corp.'s spinal cord stimulation system cut diabetic neuropathy pain in half or more in 85% of patients in a study published on April 5 in JAMA Neurology. Patients receiving the stimulation treatment delivered by the Senza system experienced an average reduction in pain of 76% at six months in the largest clinical largest trial to date to evaluate the use of spinal cord stimulation (SCS) in painful diabetic neuropathy (PDN).

TORONTO – Robotics researchers at Ontario’s University of Waterloo are stealing a page from makers of autonomous or self-driving vehicles, developing wearable, motor-controlled technology to restore physical mobility in people with disabilities without the need to think about or guide the system. The project, called Exonet, is being led by Brokoslaw Laschowski, who contrasts this approach with engineers ramping up the ability of users to control the exoskeleton.