University of Notre Dame researchers have successfully created three-dimensional anatomical models from CT scans using 3-D printing technology, a process that holds promise for medical professionals and their patients. A paper by the researchers, “,” was published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments this week.

The strategy was initiated last spring by then-freshman Evan Doney, a student in the laboratory of , research assistant professor at the . “It’s a very clever idea,” Leevy said. “He did a lot of it independently. He figured out how to convert the tomographic data to a surface map for editing and subsequent 3-D printing.”

The paper reports results based on using X-ray CT data sets from a living Lobund-Wistar rat from the and from the preserved skull of a New Zealand white rabbit in the laboratory of . Co-authors of the article with Doney, Leevy and Ravosa are Lauren Krumdick, Justin Diener, Connor Wathen, Sarah Chapman, Jeremiah Scott and Tony Van Avermaete, all of Notre Dame, and Brian Stamile of MakerBot Industries LLC, a 3-D printing company.

“With proper data collection, surface rendering and stereolithographic editing, it is now possible and inexpensive to rapidly produce detailed skeletal and soft tissue structures from X-ray CT data,” the paper said. "The translation of pre-clinical 3-D data to a physical object that is an exact copy of the test subject is a powerful tool for visualization and communication, especially for relating imaging research to students, or those in other fields.”

“Our project with 3-D printing is part of a broader story about 3-D printing in general,” Leevy said, adding that the work has spawned several more ideas and opportunities, such as providing inexpensive models for anatomy students. “There’s a market for these bones, both from animals and from humans, and we can create them at incredibly low cost. We’re going to explore a lot of these markets.”

A clinical collaborator, Dr. Douglas Liepert from Allied Physicians of Michiana, is enabling the researchers to print nonidentifiable human data, expanding the possibilities. “Not only can we print bone structure, but we’re starting to collect patient data and print out the anatomical structure of patients with different disease states to aid doctors in surgical preparation,” Leevy said.

J. Christopher Howk, Nicolas Lehner and Grant Mathews of the at the University of Notre Dame published a paper this week in the journal Nature titled “.” The astrophysicists have explored a discrepancy between the amount of lithium predicted by the standard models of elemental production during the Big Bang and the amount of lithium observed in the gas of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy near to our own.

“The paper involves measuring the amount of lithium in the interstellar gas of a nearby galaxy, but it may have implications for fundamental physics, in that it could imply the presence of dark matter particles in the early universe that decay or annihilate one another,” Howk says. “This may be a probe of physics in the early universe that gives us a handle on new physics we don’t have another way to get a handle on right now.”

The team, using observations from European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, measured the amount of lithium in the interstellar gas of the Small Magellanic Cloud, which has far fewer star-produced heavy elements than the Milky Way. In addition to the production of elements by fusion in the core of stars, scientists believe conditions immediately after the Big Bang led to the formation of some elements, including a small amount of lithium.

Stars in the Milky Way have about four times less lithium on the surface than expected by Big Bang predictions. Some scientists suggest that stellar activity might destroy lithium, or the element might sink from the surface through lighter hydrogen, but the remarkably consistent ratio from star to star is a challenge to those explanations. Observations of gas in the Small Magellanic Cloud revealed the amount of lithium that predictions say would have been produced at the Big Bang, but leave no room for subsequent production of the element.

One explanation could be a novel kind of physics operating at the Big Bang that left less lithium than the Standard Model predicts. To pursue this possibility, the team will conduct three nights of observations on the VLT in November. They will look for the lithium isotope 7Li in the Large Magellanic Cloud and 6Li in both the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud. The standard model predicts that no 6Li was created at the Big Bang.

Brian Fields of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign co-authored the work.

Contact: Chris Howk, 574-631-8594, jhowk@nd.edu

, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame, has collaborated with faculty and students to demonstrate advances in paper paper analytical devices (PADs) to test for counterfeit drugs. The promising low-tech solution has received broad attention in the scientific community. Lieberman’s work was featured in Chemical and Engineering News and presented recently at the American Chemical Society’s 244th National Meeting in Philadelphia.

This past June, Lieberman and graduate student Abigail Weaver were invited to present at a workshop in Nairobi, Kenya. The Gates Foundation and Grand Challenges Canada funded the workshop that brought U.S. researchers together with African academics and policy makers to survey state-of-the-art diagnostics designed for use in low-resource settings — such as clinics that do not have reliable electrical power. With Weaver, Lieberman demonstrated paper analytical devices for detection of counterfeit antibiotics, anti-malarials and anti-TB medications. Although the PAD is not able to quantify the amount of each pharmaceutical ingredient present, it distinguished pure amoxicillin and amoxicillin that had been adulterated with maize meal in the Kenya workshop.

Pharmacists and officials in Kenya are continually looking for counterfeit pharmaceuticals but frequently lack access to the complex testing equipment necessary to confirm a drug’s authenticity. The PADs will provide a workable alternative to ordinary laboratory tests because they combine a simple and inexpensive test with the powerful African cell phone network to enable both individuals and institutions to detect low-quality pharmaceuticals.

“We would whip out our paper devices and do tests right there on their desktops,” Lieberman said. Users can swipe tablets across the paper, which is prepared with different lanes to detect different ingredients and reveals the content with a color code. The device can detect both the desired active ingredients in the tablet and the presence of unauthorized fillers, a common problem in counterfeit drugs in developing countries. “These tests are possible because we’re making a smart material, where information on how to add the reagents is stored in the paper matrix and the test output can be read like a color bar code.”

The devices were developed in collaboration with Holly Goodson of the at Notre Dame, Patrick Flynn of the at Notre Dame and Toni Barstis of the Department of Chemistry and Physics at Saint Mary’s College.

Other researchers in the field first gained broad attention in a paper published by George Whitesides in 2007. Those include Paul Yager at the University of Washington, Seattle; Scott Phillips at Pennsylvania State University; and Richard Crooks at the University of Texas, Austin, whose group uses paper-folding origami to create multi-layered devices. Diagnostics for All (DFA), which holds licenses from the Whitesides lab, is developing a device to reliably measure the levels of two liver enzymes.

Lieberman and Goodson are members of the , which provided funding for Lieberman’s work in Kenya and awarded a graduate fellowship to Weaver. The American Chemical Society also supported Weaver’s travel through the GREET program.

Contact: Marya Lieberman, 574-631-4665, Marya.Lieberman.1@nd.edu

Notre Dame astrophysicist has been invited to the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden on Dec. 10 when Nobel Laureates Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter will receive the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae.

Garnavich, who wrote the team’s first paper that included supernovae data from the Hubble telescope, was a part of the High-Z Supernova Search Team led by Schmidt.

Riess was a member of the same team, and Perlmutter was the leader of the rival Supernova Cosmology Project. The researchers demonstrated in the late 1990s that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, leading to the now-standard understanding of dark energy in the universe. The High-Z Supernova Search Team which was composed of about 20 members in 1994 was led by Schmidt and was looking for very distant supernovae.

“We were trying to measure the density of matter, which we thought was the only thing in the universe,” he said. “Researchers at the time were studying whether the universe would continue to expand or whether it would slow and eventually collapse. The first paper didn’t have enough supernovae to detect acceleration, but did show the universe would not ever recollapse.”

By the time Riess wrote the second paper in 1998, the group had gathered sufficient data, including more supernovae data from the Hubble, to show that the universe’s expansion is accelerating.

“This is a big surprise,” Garnavich said. “It requires something that Einstein had postulated, the cosmological constant, but then discarded after it was discovered that the universe is expanding. Now we call it dark energy because we don’t know what it is.”

The group went on to study what dark energy might be, and Garnavich led a paper that constrained the variety of possible models that might produce the acceleration. Since then, researchers have cataloged hundreds of supernovae with ground-based telescopes and hope to collect significantly more data with space-based equipment to pursue understanding of dark energy.

The awarding of a Nobel Prize only 13 years after the discovery indicates the significance of the work, Garnavich said.

“It was one of biggest discoveries in last 50 years,” he said. “It really did change the view of the universe. It has become kind of a standard model now to have matter in the universe dominated by some kind of dark energy. That’s not something people considered very likely just 20 years ago."

Contact: Peter Garnavich, 574-631-7262, pgarnavi@nd.edu