Who's Afraid of Electrical Stimulation? Let's Revisit the Application of NMES at the Knee.

BACKGROUND: Restoring quadriceps strength is essential for successful rehabilitation of knee injuries, but many athletes return to their previous activity with persisting muscle weakness. Strong evidence supports using neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) to improve quadriceps strength; however, there is a lack of widespread clinical implementation. We believe there is a critical need to provide clinical approaches that promote using NMES to improve patients' quadriceps strength and ensuring clinicians provide high-value rehabilitation care. CLINICAL QUESTION: What is best practice when using NMES to facilitate strength after injury, what are barriers to its use, and how can they be addressed? KEY RESULTS: We discuss the low clinical implementation of NMES, perceived barriers to using NMES, and provide recommendations for setup and dosage parameters for effective use of NMES. CLINICAL APPLICATION: We aim for this commentary, with accompanying videos, to serve as a resource for clinicians who are using commercially available NMES units in clinical practice. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther 2024;54(2):1-6. Epub 31 October 2023. doi:10.2519/jospt.2023.12028.

Analytical TEM examinations of CoPt-TiO2 perpendicular magnetic recording media.

For this analytical TEM study, nonmagnetic oxygen-rich boundaries were introduced into Co-Pt-alloy perpendicular recording media by cosputtering Co and Pt with TiO2. Increasing the TiO2 content resulted in changes to the microstructure and elemental distribution within grains and boundaries in these films. EFTEM imaging was used to generate composition maps spanning many tens of grains, thereby giving an overall depiction of the changes in elemental distribution occurring with increasing TiO2 content. Comparing EFTEM with spectrum-imaging maps created by high-resolution STEM with EDXS and EELS enabled both corroboration of EFTEM results and quantification of the chemical composition within individual grain boundary areas. The difficulty of interpreting data from EDXS for these extremely thin films is discussed. Increasing the TiO2 content of the media was found to create more uniformly wide Ti- and O-rich grain boundaries as well as Ti- and O-rich regions within grains.