Medical manikins play an essential role in the training process of physicians. Currently, most available simulators for abdominal palpation training do not contain controllable organs for dynamic simulations. In this paper, we present a soft robotics controllable liver that can simulate various liver diseases and symptoms for effective and realistic palpation training. The tumors in the liver model are designed based on granular jamming with positive pressure, which converts the fluid-like impalpable particles to a solid-like tumor state by applying low positive pressure on the membrane. Through inflation, the tumor size, liver stiffness, and liver size can be controlled from normal liver state to various abnormalities including enlarged liver, cirrhotic liver, and multiple cancerous and malignant tumors. Mechanical tests have been conducted in the study to evaluate the liver design and the role of positive pressure granular jamming in tumor simulations.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/EMBC.2018.8512709 | DOI Listing |
ACS Biomater Sci Eng
January 2025
Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette 47907-2050, Indiana, United States.
Granular hydrogels are injectable and inherently porous biomaterials assembled through the packing of microparticles. These particles typically have a symmetric and spherical shape. However, recent studies have shown that asymmetric particles with high aspect ratios, such as fibers and rods, can significantly improve the mechanics, structure, and cell-guidance ability of granular hydrogels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Commun
December 2024
Department of Electronics and Information Convergence Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Yongin-si, Republic of Korea.
Self-assembled configurations are versatile for applications in which liquid-mediated phenomena are employed to ensure that static or mild physical interactions between assembling blocks take advantage of local energy minima. For granular materials, however, a particle's momentum in air leads to random collisions and the formation of disordered phases, eventually producing jammed configurations when densely packed. Therefore, unlike fluidic self-assembly, the self-assembly of dry particles typically lacks programmability based on density and ordering symmetry and has thus been limited in applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSoft Robot
December 2024
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea.
Based on the analysis of the structures of robots and electronics developed so far, it should be noted that a majority of them need a reservoir for electrical energy storage. Unfortunately, most off-the-shelf devices commercially available nowadays are based on rigid parts that heavily limit the possibilities of incorporating such products into soft robots and wearable electronics. To address these issues, a new type of flexible structure for electrical energy storage, which consists of small battery cells connected by liquid metal paths, was proposed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhys Rev E
November 2024
GRASP, Institute of Physics B5a, University of Liège, B4000 Liège, Belgium.
Granular fluids, as defined by a collection of moving solid particles, is a paradigm of a dissipative system out of equilibrium. Inelastic collisions between particles is the source of dissipation, and is the origin of a transition from a gas to a liquidlike state. This transition can be triggered by an increase of the solid fraction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCytoskeleton (Hoboken)
December 2024
Applied Physics Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
Tumor metastasis is a complex phenomenon that poses significant challenges to current cancer therapeutics. While the biochemical signaling involved in promoting motile phenotypes is well understood, the role of biomechanical interactions has recently begun to be incorporated into models of tumor cell migration. Specifically, we propose the unjamming transition, adapted from physical paradigms describing the behavior of granular materials, to better discern the transition toward an invasive phenotype.
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