The 13th ICME International Conference on Complex Medical Engineering will take place in Dortmund, on September 23-25, 2019. The objective of the conference is to provide a forum for researchers, educators, engineers, neurologists, medical staff and government officials involved in the general areas of biomedical engineering to disseminate their latest research results and exchange views on future research directions of these fields.
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The vision of the H2020-supported EU-ToxRisk project is to drive the required paradigm shift in toxicological testing away from ‘black box’ animal testing towards a toxicological assessment based on human cell responses and a comprehensive mechanistic understanding of cause-consequence relationships of chemical adverse effects. 
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Concrete recommendations for specific activities in the care sector are given in the fifth publication within the framework of the Dortmund Lumbar Load Study 3 (DOLLY 3).
In DOLLY 3, the third Dortmund Lumbar Load Study, the load on the lumbar spine through manual patient handling was investigated. The current publication (part 5) contains concrete recommendations in the form of task-specific practical action instructions. These are based on pair-wise comparisons of task executions combined with varied spinal loadings, in order to identify the essential differences of posture and force development of the caregiver with respect to a back-friendly handling of patients. In summary, the newly developed scientifically substantiated actions instructions provide an effective basis to limit the biomechanical overload risk for the spine of healthcare workers.
The Dortmund Lumbar Load Studies – DOLLY
The akronym ”DOLLY” originates from the english title ”The Dortmund Lumbar Load Study”. The DOLLYs represent comprehensive investigations regarding the occupationally induced load on the lumbar spine in diverse vocational fields. The initial DOLLY demonstrates a monitoring of lumbar load for complete working shifts, DOLLY 2 provides a lumbar-load register for a variety of typical manual materials handling tasks. DOLLY 3 focuses on care activities. This 5-part study was conducted by the Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors (IfADo) in intensive cooperation with the German Social Accident Insurance Institution for the Health and Welfare Services (BGW):
A €50 million European public–private partnership (PPP) has paved the way to a new era of assessing chemical safety without using animals. SEURAT-1 –Towards the Replacement of In VivoRepeated Dose Systemic Toxicity Testing –showcases its achievements during a final symposium on 4 December 2015.
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In a large (30 Million €) H2020-supported collaborative project, academia joins forces with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), large industry, contract research organisations (CROs) and regulatory bodies to achieve a paradigm shift in toxicology towards a more efficient and animal-free chemical safety assessment.
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Stem cell research gets more and more important because these cells can be directed to differentiate into practically all mature cell types. This represents a potential solution for therapeutics of severely damaged organs and also an alternative to animal drug and toxicity testing. Nonetheless an essential question still remains: How similar are differentiated stem cells to the desired mature cells, e.g. liver cells? Scientists at IfADo – Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors in cooperation with partners from EU and UK developed a method for precisely assessing the degree of stem cell-differentiation into mature liver cells (i.e. hepatocytes) based on whole-genome gene expression analysis and statistical models.
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