NEWS
Nov 2, 2018

Global Excitement about Spinal Cord Injury Results Published in Nature

Esra Neufeld and IT'IS Director Niels Kuster are co-authors on a paper published 31 October 2018 in Nature (Wagner et al., Nature 563:65–71) on the results of a study led by neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch of Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) in which three paraplegic patients recovered the ability to walk after years of paralysis. The new treatment is considered a major hope-giving breakthrough for spinal-cord-injury patients. The IT'IS researchers contributed to the newly developed treatment by using Sim4Life to perform electromagnetic and electrophysiology modeling towards providing patient-specific guidance on the identification of appropriate electrode positioning and stimulation parameters to restore functionality.
According to the website Altmetric, the Nature publication has been covered in the popular press worldwide, with - so far just 2 days after publication - 71 news stories and more than 1600 Tweets. The news outlets covering the story include Forbes, Newsweek, Scientific American, and the New York Times (in English), NZZ and Spiegel (German), NewsPress and La Presse (French), Volkskrant (Dutch), Wired (Italian), El Peridico (Spanish), to name just a few.
For an up-to-date list of news stories about this paper, check the Altmetric site.