Modular soft robots (MSRs) exhibit greater potential for sophisticated tasks compared with single-module robots. However, the modular structure incurs the complexity of accurate control and necessitates a control strategy specifically for modular robots. In this article, we introduce a data collection strategy tailored for MSR and a bidirectional long short-term memory (biLSTM) configuration controller capable of adapting to varying module numbers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe widespread adoption of robotic technologies in healthcare has opened up new perspectives for enhancing accuracy, effectiveness and quality of medical procedures and patients' care. Special attention has been given to the reliability of robots when operating in environments shared with humans and to the users' safety, especially in case of mobile platforms able to navigate autonomously. From the analysis of the literature, it emerges that navigation tests carried out in a hospital environment are preliminary and not standardized.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiseases of the esophageal tract represent a heterogeneous class of pathological conditions for which diagnostic paradigms continue to emerge. In the last few decades, innovative diagnostic devices have been developed, and several attempts have been made to advance and standardize diagnostic algorithms to be compliant with medical procedures. To the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive review of the procedures and available technologies to investigate the esophageal tract was missing in the literature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: The Human Machine Interface (HMI) of intraluminal robots has a crucial impact on the clinician's performance. It increases or decreases the difficulty of the tasks, and is connected to the users' physical and mental stress.
Objective: This article presents a framework to compare and evaluate different HMIs for robotic colonoscopy, with the objective of identifying the optimal HMI that minimises the clinician's effort and maximises the clinical outcomes.
Sleep deprivation (SD) negatively affects several aspects of cognitive performance, and one of the most widely-used tools to evaluate these effects is the Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT). The present study investigated the possibility of predicting changes induced by SD in vigilant attention performance by evaluating the baseline electroencephalographic (EEG) activity immediately preceding the PVT stimuli onset. All participants ( = 10) underwent EEG recordings during 10 min of PVT before and after a night of SD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo improve decision-making strategies and prediction based on epidemiological data, so far biased by highly-variable criteria, algorithms using unbiased morbidity parameters, i.e. Intensive Care Units (ICU) and Ordinary Hospitalizations (OH), are proposed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWithin the debate on shaping future clinical services, where different robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) based technologies are integrated to perform tasks, the authors take the chance to provide an interdisciplinary analysis required to validate a tool aiming at supporting the melanoma cancer diagnosis. In particular, they focus on the ethical-legal and technical requirements needed to address the Assessment List on Trustworthy AI (ALTAI), highlighting some pros and cons of the adopted self-assessment checklist. The dialogue stimulates additionally remarks on the EU regulatory initiatives on AI in the healthcare systems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper presents a multivariate dataset of 2866 food flipping movements, performed by 4 chefs and 5 home cooks, with different grilled food and two utensils (spatula and tweezers). The 3D trajectories of strategic points in the utensils were tracked using optoelectronic motion capture. The pinching force of the tweezers, the bending force and torsion torque of the spatula were also recorded, as well as videos and the subject gaze.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
November 2021
Screening of the gastrointestinal tract is imperative for the detection and treatment of physiological and pathological disorders in humans. Ingestible devices (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Cyclic Alternating Pattern (CAP) is composed of cycles of two different electroencephalographic features: an activation A-phase followed by a B-phase representing the background activity. CAP is considered a physiological marker of sleep instability. Despite its informative nature, the clinical applications remain limited as CAP analysis is a time-consuming activity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe healing process of surgically-stabilised long bone fractures depends on two main factors: (a) the assessment of implant stability, and (b) the knowledge of bone callus stiffness. Currently, X-rays are the main diagnostic tool used for the assessment of bone fractures. However, they are considered unsafe, and the interpretation of the clinical results is highly subjective, depending on the clinician's experience.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMelanoma has the highest mortality rate among skin cancers, and early-diagnosis is essential to maximize survival rate. The current procedure for melanoma diagnosis is based on dermoscopy, i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA magnetically-guided capsule endoscope, embedding flexible force sensors, is designed to measure the capsule-tissue interaction force. The flexible force sensor is composed of eight force-sensitive elements surrounding the internal permanent magnet (IPM). The control of interaction force acting on the intestinal wall can reduce patient's discomfort and maintain the magnetic coupling between the external permanent magnet (EPM) and the IPM during capsule navigation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy is the gold standard in the detection and treatment of early and advanced GI cancers. However, conventional endoscopic techniques are technically demanding and require visual-spatial skills and significant hands-on experience. GI endoscopy simulators represent a valid solution to allow doctors to practice in a pre-clinical scenario.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study presents a thorough analysis of sleep/wake detection algorithms for efficient on-device sleep tracking using wearable accelerometric devices. It develops a novel end-to-end algorithm using convolutional neural network applied to raw accelerometric signals recorded by an open-source wrist-worn actigraph. The aim of the study is to develop an automatic classifier that: (1) is highly generalizable to heterogenous subjects, (2) would not require manual features' extraction, (3) is computationally lightweight, embeddable on a sleep tracking device, and (4) is suitable for a wide assortment of actigraphs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUpper gastrointestinal (UGI) tract pathology is common worldwide. With recent advancements in robotics, innovative diagnostic and treatment devices have been developed and several translational attempts made. This review paper aims to provide a highly pictorial critical review of robotic gastroscopes, so that clinicians and researchers can obtain a swift and comprehensive overview of key technologies and challenges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSensors (Basel)
September 2020
The capsule endoscopy robot can only use monocular vision due to the dimensional limit. To improve the depth perception of the monocular capsule endoscopy robot, this paper proposes a photometric stereo-based depth map reconstruction method. First, based on the characteristics of the capsule endoscopy robot system, a photometric stereo framework is established.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Despite offering a prime paradigm for screening, CRC screening is often hampered by invasiveness. Endoo is a potentially painless colonoscopy method with an active locomotion tethered capsule offering diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFlexible colonoscopy remains the prime mean of screening for colorectal cancer (CRC) and the gold standard of all population-based screening pathways around the world. Almost 60% of CRC deaths could be prevented with screening. However, colonoscopy attendance rates are affected by discomfort, fear of pain and embarrassment or loss of control during the procedure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper reviews automated visual-based defect detection approaches applicable to various materials, such as metals, ceramics and textiles. In the first part of the paper, we present a general taxonomy of the different defects that fall in two classes: visible (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurrent scientific literature provides evidence that trigeminal sensorimotor activity associated with chewing may affect arousal, attention, and cognitive performance. These effects may be due to widespread connections of the trigeminal system to the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS), to which noradrenergic neurons of the locus coeruleus (LC) belongs. LC neurons contain projections to the whole brain, and it is known that their discharge co-varies with pupil size.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOptical and electromagnetic tracking systems represent the two main technologies integrated into commercially-available surgical navigators for computer-assisted image-guided surgery so far. Optical Tracking Systems (OTSs) work within the optical spectrum to track the position and orientation, i.e.
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