Patient-Specific Magnetic Catheters for Atraumatic Autonomous Endoscopy.

Despite increasing interest in minimally invasive surgical techniques and related developments in flexible endoscopes and catheters, follow-the-leader motion remains elusive. Following the path of least resistance through a tortuous and potentially delicate environment without relying on interaction with the surrounding anatomy requires the control of many degrees of freedom. This typically results in large-diameter instruments.

Evolutionary Inverse Material Identification: Bespoke Characterization of Soft Materials Using a Metaheuristic Algorithm.

The growing interest in soft robotics has resulted in an increased demand for accurate and reliable material modelling. As soft robots experience high deformations, highly nonlinear behavior is possible. Several analytical models that are able to capture this nonlinear behavior have been proposed, however, accurately calibrating them for specific materials and applications can be challenging.

Feasibility of Fiber Reinforcement Within Magnetically Actuated Soft Continuum Robots.

Soft continuum manipulators have the potential to replace traditional surgical catheters; offering greater dexterity with access to previously unfeasible locations for a wide range of interventions including neurological and cardiovascular. Magnetically actuated catheters are of particular interest due to their potential for miniaturization and remote control. Challenges around the operation of these catheters exist however, and one of these occurs when the angle between the actuating field and the local magnetization vector of the catheter exceeds 90°.

Guidelines for Robotic Flexible Endoscopy at the Time of COVID-19.

Flexible endoscopy involves the insertion of a long narrow flexible tube into the body for diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. In the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, flexible endoscopy plays a major role in cancer screening, surveillance, and treatment programs. As a result of gas insufflation during the procedure, both upper and lower GI endoscopy procedures have been classified as aerosol generating by the guidelines issued by the respective societies during the COVID-19 pandemic-although no quantifiable data on aerosol generation currently exists.

Local stimulation of osteocytes using a magnetically actuated oscillating beam.

Mechanical loading on bone tissue is an important physiological stimulus that plays a key role in bone growth, fracture repair, and treatment of bone diseases. Osteocytes (bone cells embedded in bone matrix) are well accepted as the sensor cells to mechanical loading and play a critical role in regulating the bone structure in response to mechanical loading. To understand the response of osteocytes to differential mechanical stimulation in physiologically relevant arrangements, there is a need for a platform which can locally stimulate bone cells with different levels of fluid shear stress.

Millimeter-scale flexible robots with programmable three-dimensional magnetization and motions.

Flexible magnetic small-scale robots use patterned magnetization to achieve fast transformation into complex three-dimensional (3D) shapes and thereby achieve locomotion capabilities and functions. These capabilities address current challenges for microrobots in drug delivery, object manipulation, and minimally invasive procedures. However, possible microrobot designs are limited by the existing methods for patterning magnetic particles in flexible materials.

A generic label-free microfluidic microobject sorter using a magnetic elastic diverter.

Cell sorters play important roles in biological and medical applications, such as cellular behavior study and disease diagnosis and therapy. This work presents a label-free microfluidic sorter that has a downstream-pointing magnetic elastic diverter. Different with most existing magnetic sorters, the proposed device does not require the target microobjects to be intrinsically magnetic or coated with magnetic particles, giving users more flexibility in sorting criteria.