9,360 research outputs found
The future of laboratory medicine - A 2014 perspective.
Predicting the future is a difficult task. Not surprisingly, there are many examples and assumptions that have proved to be wrong. This review surveys the many predictions, beginning in 1887, about the future of laboratory medicine and its sub-specialties such as clinical chemistry and molecular pathology. It provides a commentary on the accuracy of the predictions and offers opinions on emerging technologies, economic factors and social developments that may play a role in shaping the future of laboratory medicine
Towards Robotic Laboratory Automation Plug & Play: Survey and Concept Proposal on Teaching-free Robot Integration with the LAPP Digital Twin
The Laboratory Automation Plug & Play (LAPP) framework is an over-arching
reference architecture concept for the integration of robots in life science
laboratories. The plug & play nature lies in the fact that manual configuration
is not required, including the teaching of the robots. In this paper a digital
twin (DT) based concept is proposed that outlines the types of information that
have to be provided for each relevant component of the system. In particular,
for the devices interfacing with the robot, the robot positions have to be
defined beforehand in a device-attached coordinate system (CS) by the vendor.
This CS has to be detectable by the vision system of the robot by means of
optical markers placed on the front side of the device. With that, the robot is
capable of tending the machine by performing the pick-and-place type
transportation of standard sample carriers. This basic use case is the primary
scope of the LAPP-DT framework. The hardware scope is limited to simple
benchtop and mobile manipulators with parallel grippers at this stage. This
paper first provides an overview of relevant literature and state-of-the-art
solutions, after which it outlines the framework on the conceptual level,
followed by the specification of the relevant DT parameters for the robot, for
the devices and for the facility. Finally, appropriate technologies and
strategies are identified for the implementation
Using Provenance to support Good Laboratory Practice in Grid Environments
Conducting experiments and documenting results is daily business of
scientists. Good and traceable documentation enables other scientists to
confirm procedures and results for increased credibility. Documentation and
scientific conduct are regulated and termed as "good laboratory practice."
Laboratory notebooks are used to record each step in conducting an experiment
and processing data. Originally, these notebooks were paper based. Due to
computerised research systems, acquired data became more elaborate, thus
increasing the need for electronic notebooks with data storage, computational
features and reliable electronic documentation. As a new approach to this, a
scientific data management system (DataFinder) is enhanced with features for
traceable documentation. Provenance recording is used to meet requirements of
traceability, and this information can later be queried for further analysis.
DataFinder has further important features for scientific documentation: It
employs a heterogeneous and distributed data storage concept. This enables
access to different types of data storage systems (e. g. Grid data
infrastructure, file servers). In this chapter we describe a number of building
blocks that are available or close to finished development. These components
are intended for assembling an electronic laboratory notebook for use in Grid
environments, while retaining maximal flexibility on usage scenarios as well as
maximal compatibility overlap towards each other. Through the usage of such a
system, provenance can successfully be used to trace the scientific workflow of
preparation, execution, evaluation, interpretation and archiving of research
data. The reliability of research results increases and the research process
remains transparent to remote research partners.Comment: Book Chapter for "Data Provenance and Data Management for eScience,"
of Studies in Computational Intelligence series, Springer. 25 pages, 8
figure
Automation in the clinical microbiology laboratory.
Automation in the clinical microbiology laborator
A safe and energy efficient robotic system for industrial automatic tests on domestic appliances: Problem statement and proof of concept
In this paper, the design and the development of a robotic platform conceived to perform accelerated life tests on a newly manufactured domestic appliances is presented. The proposed system aims at improving the safety of human operators that share the workspace with the robotic platform which is a common scenario of test laboratories. A deep learning algorithm is used for the human detection and pose estimation, while the integration between a conventional motion planning algorithm with a fast 3D collision checker has been implemented as a global planner plugin for the ROS navigation stack. With the twofold objective of improving safety and saving energy in the battery-powered mobile manipulator used in this project, the problem of minimizing the overall kinetic energy is addressed through a properly designed task priority controller, in which the manipulator inertia matrix is used to weight the joint speeds while satisfying multiple robotic tasks according to a hierarchy designed to interact with the appliances while preserving the safety of the human operators. Simulations are carried out to evaluate the overall control architecture and preliminary results indicate the effectiveness of the developed system in the test laboratory floors
Process automation for analytical measurements providing high precise sample preparation in life science applications
Laboratories providing life science applications will gain on improved analysis´ efficiency and reliability by automating sample pretreatment. However, commercially available automated systems are especially suitable for the standardized MTP-format allowing for biological assays, whereas automating analytical sample pretreatment is still an unsolved challenge. Therefore, the purpose of this presentation is the design, the realization, and evaluation of an automated system that supplies multistep analytical sample pretreatment and high flexibility for easy upgrading and performance adaption
MILiMAC:Flexible Catheter With Miniaturized Electromagnets as a Small-Footprint System for Microrobotic Tasks
Advancements in medical microrobotics have given rise to an abundance of agents capable of localised interaction with human body in small scales. Nevertheless, clinically-relevant applications of this technology are still limited by the auxiliary infrastructure required for actuation of micro-agents. In this letter, we approach this challenge. Using finite-element analysis, we show that miniaturization of electromagnets can be used to create systems capable of providing magnetic forces adequate for micro-agent steering, while retaining small footprint and power consumption. We use these observations to create MILiMAC (Microrobotic Infrastructure Loaded into Magnetically-Actuated Catheter). MILiMAC is a flexible catheter employing three miniaturized electromagnets to provide localized magnetic actuation at the deeply-seated microsurgery site. We test our approach in a proof-of-concept study deploying MILiMAC inside a test platform to deliver and steer a 600 [\boldsymbol{\mu }m] ferromagnetic microbead. The bead is steered along a set of user-defined trajectories using closed-loop position control. Across all trajectories the best performance metrics are the mean error of 0.41 [mm] and the steady-state error of 0.27 [mm]
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