The research on war injuries in tropical areas is an important subject to be urgently dealt with at present in Chinese military medicine. Military medicine related to hot and humid environment is a significant branch of military environmental medicine. More efforts should be made in the research on care of war injuries as well as on military hygiene and military epidemiology so as to establish an integrated system involving basic and clinical science and art in military environmental medicine in hot and humid areas, which should be considered as an important task in the transition of our military strategy to win a war with improvement in the military medical support capability in a local high technicology conflict in such an area. In this paper, the significance of paying more attention to the research on the care of war injuries in hot and humid areas is emphasized, their features are highlighted, and main problems demanding further research are proposed.

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Tissue engineering has been one of the most challenging and rapidly developing frontier fields of science in the recent 20 years. Being referred to as “a medical revolution of far-reaching significance”, “a new epoch of regenerative medicine”, it signals the coming of a period of reproduction of regenerative tissue and organs. It has drawn intensive attention and support from medical circles and governments all over the world because of its advantages in trauma repair, functional reconstruction, life saving and improving quality of life, as well as its huge social and economic values. Products of tissue engineered skin and cartilage with approval of the American FDA have been available. Hundreds of tissue engineering companies and research centers have been set up both abroad and at home. It is now possible to construct tissue-engineered tissues. Moreover, projects of complex organ construction by means of tissue engineering is being carried out vigorously in the world. Some tissue-engineered tissues have been put into trial use in clinic and resulted in encouraging outcome. All these forecast a bright and promising prospect for tissue engineering. As a new branch of science and technology that involves multiple specialties and fields, however, it is still at its initial stage. Many fundamental scientific problems are to be explored, and many technical difficulties to be overcome. Hope and difficulty coexist; opportunity and challenge stand side by side. We should seize the opportunity and meet the challenge with our creative and strenuous efforts to make tissue engineering benefit human beings as early and much as possible.

Bone tissue engineering is the focus of recent research. Its status quo and tendency are discussed from scaffold, cell and tissue reconstruction. Based on this analysis, we want to shorten the distance before it's clinical application and give some reasonable methods.

With 20 years’ development, tissue engineering has proceeded to a new stage where the focuses of research are quite different from those at the initial stage. Clinical application and industrial development have been the chief concerns for tissue engineering. After brief comments on the current advances and future prospects, this paper suggests that the future tendencies and strategies will be the primary clinical application, industrial development of tissue engineering products, increasing integration of basic research and clinical application and industrial development, construction of bionic and intelligent tissues or organs, and reliability evaluation. This paper also puts forward some strategies.

Field medical equipment is important material base of medical service in wartime and one organic part of medical care scheme in echelon. However, medical service under hot and humid environment (HHE) is characterized by some new features due to the dual influences of environmental factor and war injury itself, which might bring certain challengeable demands on medical equipment development. As one part of medical care scheme in echelon under HHE, this paper presents a general study on demands of field medical equipment under HHE aimed to provide references for demonstration, research and development of medical equipment of Chinese PLA in the future.

OBJECTIVE: Polylactic acid (PLA) is a biodegradable polymer possessing good biocompatibility and biodegradability, and approved as a biomaterial for in vivo implantation by American Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The role of cytokines in promoting osteogenesis and vascularization for constructing tissue-engineered bones has received increasing attention.But exogenous cytokine has shorter half-life in vivo and can not reach and maintain relatively high local level for bone repair. This article reviews the present researches and analyzes the application prospect of PLA and its derivatives in bone tissue engineering to serve as the carrier for polypeptide and protein medicines with controlled release through its degradation.DATA SOURCES: Related articles published between 1993 and 2004were searched in Medline database with key words of "polylactic acid,bone morphogenetic protein, vascular endothelial growth factor, TGF- beta", limiting the language to English; meanwhile the related medical papers between 1993 and 2004 were also searched in the Chinese Periodical Database, limiting the language to Chinese.STUDY SELECTION: Related researches on PLA and its derivatives for constructing bone tissue-engineering Scaffolds and study of PLA scaffolds carrying cytokines were included with the obsolete literature and repetitive researches eliminated.DATA EXTRACTION: Altogether 96 related literatures on PLA and its derivatives for constructing bone tissue-engineering scaffolds were collected, 23 of which were included in this review.DATA SYNTHESIS: PLA/PLA-polyglycolic acid copolymer is a good biodegradable scaffold for controlled drug release, having the dual functions as scaffolds and sustained-release drug carrier. PLA is the earliest scaffold material in bone and cartilage tissue-engineering, and also the most widely used tissue-engineering material at present. BMP is the most frequently adopted cytokine in bone tissue-engineering, and PLA scaffolds carrying sustained-release BMP is studies most thoroughly, but researches on PLA scaffolds carrying vascular endothelia growth factor has not been conducted.CONCLUSION: Development and application of PLA scaffolds carrying various sustained-release cytokines has become the new interest in bone tissue-engineering researches.

Objective This article aimed to describe an interactive segmenting method for serial anatomical cross-sectional image of Chinese Digital Human(CDH) using commercially available software,Photoshop CS(Adobe;San Jose,CA,Corel KnockOut 2.0 plug-in) and Matlab 7.0(Math Works;Worcester,MA). Methods First,the interesting region was segmented from the image interactively utilizing the Knochout menu of Adobe Photoshop which had a powerful masking function.And then smooth contour was acquired precisely by morphological operation function and edge detection operator(the Sobel method) in Matlab. Results The segmentation and classification of bone,muscle and main vascular nerve were fulfilled successfully and the smooth contour lines were acquired with precise details and accurate localization.Conclusion This local clustering segmenting method might segment and classify the colored image of Chinese Digital Human quickly and precisely.

Vascularization is one of the major c hallenges in tissue engineering gra ft.Vascular plexus falls into two modes which are different in recourse of endotheliocyte:vascul ogenesis and angiogenesis.Both mod es are a dynamic and complicated physiological process.Various kinds of growth factor and adhesion molecule modula te the process.Both in vitro and in vivo methods are used in vascularization research.In vitro methods are used to e-valuate biomaterials for endothelial cell attachment,cytotoxicity,g rowth,angiogenesis and its effects on gene reg-ulation.Chorioallantoic membrane(CAM)is one of the simplest and effective models in vivo.Animals are used as more advanced models.The strategie s of vascularization of tissue engin eering include:modification of the surface of the biomaterials,addition of slow-release growth factor to scaffold,e ndotheliocyte cocultured with other seed cells,wrapping by vascular net,implantin g blood vessel bundles into the graft,seeding biomaterial implants with vascular remnants as vascular template,and c reating perfused microvessels in vitro.None of these approaches,however,is satisfactory at present.We believe that an ideal method will be finally f ound for vascularization in tissue e ngineering with advancement of research on mech anism of vascularization and progre ss in techniques.[