CFD-Based Flow Channel Optimization and Performance Prediction for a Conical Axial Maglev Blood Pump.

Ventricular assist devices or total artificial hearts can be used to save patients with heart failure when there are no donors available for heart transplantation. Blood pumps are integral parts of such devices, but traditional axial flow blood pumps have several shortcomings. In particular, they cause hemolysis and thrombosis due to the mechanical contact and wear of the bearings, and they cause blood stagnation due to the separation of the front and rear guide wheel hubs and the impeller hub.

Geometric calibration of markerless optical surgical navigation system.

Background: Patient-to-image registration is required for image-guided surgical navigation, but marker-based registration is time consuming and is subject to manual error. Markerless registration is an alternative solution to avoid these issues.

Methods: This study designs a calibration board and proposes a geometric calibration method to calibrate the near-infrared tracking and structured light components of the proposed optical surgical navigation system simultaneously.

Strategy for accurate liver intervention by an optical tracking system.

Image-guided navigation for radiofrequency ablation of liver tumors requires the accurate guidance of needle insertion into a tumor target. The main challenge of image-guided navigation for radiofrequency ablation of liver tumors is the occurrence of liver deformations caused by respiratory motion. This study reports a strategy of real-time automatic registration to track custom fiducial markers glued onto the surface of a patient's abdomen to find the respiratory phase, in which the static preoperative CT is performed.