μRALP and Beyond: Micro-Technologies and Systems for Robot-Assisted Endoscopic Laser Microsurgery.

Laser microsurgery is the current gold standard surgical technique for the treatment of selected diseases in delicate organs such as the larynx. However, the operations require large surgical expertise and dexterity, and face significant limitations imposed by available technology, such as the requirement for direct line of sight to the surgical field, restricted access, and direct manual control of the surgical instruments. To change this status quo, the European project μRALP pioneered research towards a complete redesign of current laser microsurgery systems, focusing on the development of robotic micro-technologies to enable endoscopic operations.

Non-Contact Tissue Ablations with High-Speed Laser Scanning in Endoscopic Laser Microsurgery.

The use of laser scanners in soft tissue microsurgery results in high quality ablations with minimal thermal damage to surrounding tissue. However, current scanner technologies for microsurgery are limited to free-beam lasers, requiring direct line-of-sight from outside the patient to the surgical site. Developing compact laser manipulation systems is crucial to introduce laser scanning capabilities in hard-toreach surgical sites.

Effects of geometric parameters on swimming of micro organisms with single helical flagellum in circular channels.

We present a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for the swimming of micro organisms with a single helical flagellum in circular channels. The CFD model is developed to obtain numerical solutions of Stokes equations in three dimensions, validated with experiments reported in literature, and used to analyze the effects of geometric parameters, such as the helical radius, wavelength, radii of the channel and the tail and the tail length on forward and lateral swimming velocities, rotation rates, and the efficiency of the swimmer. Optimal shapes for the speed and the power efficiency are reported.