IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering

The radical sympathectomy and percutaneous catheter-based renal denervation (RDN) are two techniques proposed to treat life-threatening resistant hypertension. However, sympathectomy has been abandoned due to the procedure being too invasive, and RDN resulted in variation in blood pressure reduction between patients due to suboptimal denervation. Thus, a method to effectively ablate renal nerves while not being very invasive is needed to treat the resistant hypertension patients. Here we propose a minimally invasive Laparoscopic Denervation System (LDS) to serve this unmet clinical need. The LDS employs a direct renal nerve ablation technique while not imparting thermal arterial damage... Read more

Nearly all spinal cord injured (SCI) individuals lose bladder control and are prone to kidney complications if intermittent catheterization is not applied. Electrical stimulation (ES) of the sacral anterior roots with an implantable neuroprosthesis is one means to restore continence... Read more

    Intestinal electrical stimulation via implants is already used to treat several disorders like constipation or incontinence. Stimulation parameters are most often empiric and not based on systematic studies. One prerequisite to evaluate effects of intestinal electrical stimulation is a direct... Read more