Remote Ultrasound Scan Procedures with Medical Robots: Towards New Perspectives between Medicine and Engineering.

BACKGROUND: This review explores state-of-the-art teleoperated robots for medical ultrasound scan procedures, providing a comprehensive look including the recent trends arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: Physicians' experience is included to indicate the importance of their role in the design of improved medical robots. From this perspective, novel classes of equipment for remote diagnostics based on medical robotics are discussed in terms of innovative engineering technologies. RESULTS: Relevant literature is reviewed under the system engineering point of view, organizing the discussion on the basis of the main technological focus of each contribution. CONCLUSIONS: This contribution is aimed at stimulating new research to obtain faster results on teleoperated robotics for ultrasound diagnostics in response to the high demand raised by the ongoing pandemic.

Real-Time Detection of Slug Velocity in Microchannels.

Microfluidics processes play a central role in the design of portable devices for biological and chemical samples analysis. The bottleneck in this technological evolution is the lack of low cost detection systems and control strategies easily adaptable in different operative conditions, able to guarantee the processes reproducibility and reliability, and suitable for on-chip applications. In this work, a methodology for velocity detection of two-phase flow is presented in microchannels. The approach presented is based on a low-cost optical signals monitoring setup. The slug flow generated by the interaction of two immiscible fluids {air and water} in two microchannels was investigated. To verify the reliability of the detection systems, the flow nonlinearity was enhanced by using curved geometries and microchannel diameter greater than 100 µ m . The optical signals were analyzed by using an approach in a time domain, to extract the slug velocity, and one in the frequency domain, to compute the slug frequency. It was possible to distinguish the water and air slugs velocity and frequency. A relation between these two parameters was also numerically established. The results obtained represent an important step in the design of non-invasive, low-cost portable systems for micro-flow analysis, in order to prove that the developed methodology was implemented to realize a platform, easy to be integrated in a System-on-a-Chip, for the real-time slug flow velocity detection. The platform performances were successfully validated in different operative conditions.