Conference Agenda

We introduce an innovative model of the human corneal stroma, regarded as a fluid-saturated continuum, with to objective to describe important swelling and thinning phenomena observed in pathological conditions. In contrast with well-settled approaches that model the stroma as a quasi-incompressible hyperelastic medium, possibly including anisotropy and heterogeneity, here we focus on the actual nature of the tissue, where the content of water reaches about 78% in weight. Although purely mechanics models have been shown to be very good at predicting physiological behaviors, they have not been able to reproduce the evolution of pathologies related to the imbalance of water content in the stroma. We regard the tissue as a fully saturated mixture of a solid phase and a fluid phase, preserving the possibility to characterize both phases in terms of multiple components. This study represents a first step towards the development of a multiphysics model capable of explaining corneal swelling and ectasia. The work is done in collaboration with Alessandro Giammarini (Polimi).

Seventy-five years after the first industrial robots tackled the three D’s – dirty, dull, and dangerous work – today’s robots inhabit our homes, hospitals, and even our bodies. This talk explores how advances in design, fabrication, and physical human-robot interaction are enabling a new generation of medical technologies to support an aging population. I will begin with teleoperated surgical systems, which have become a standard tool in operating rooms. New flexible robot designs and human-centered artificial intelligence aim to improve the precision of these systems and enhance patient outcomes. Building on these advances, I will then introduce 3D robotic bioprinters, inspired by surgical robots, that have the potential to fabricate entire biological organs. Finally, I will describe emerging approaches to physical assistance using soft robotic structures. These include wearable devices that provide comfortable haptic feedback, gentle robotic systems that lift patients, and self-donning garments. These technologies combine softness and structural support to create new ways of controlling shape, generating meaningful forces, and interacting safely and effectively with the human body.

The lack of information (like imaging modalities or actually any other measurement technique), that provide insights into crucial processes on the micro level of human lungs during breathing or ventilation is a huge problem in medicine. It not only hinders the development of better therapies but often even leads to scenarios where the (best intended) treatment harms (or even kills) patients, like in Ventilator Induced Lung Injury (VILI). This lack of insight and understanding can be overcome by novel and advanced physics-based computational models. Such models need to honor the complexity of the organ and include not only tissue mechanics but also flow and transport effects and need to cross scales, fields and dimensions. In this presentation I will explain essential aspects of such models including some very recent developments. It will focus on interesting and promising scientific developments but will also briefly sketch our path towards bringing such useful scientific developments to the clinics. Such approaches (of real digital twins) have a great potential and can even shift the current paradigm in health care.