The Next-Generation Surgical Robots

The chronicle of surgical robots is short but remarkable. Within 20 years since the regulatory approval of the first surgical robot, more than 3,000 units were installed worldwide, and more than half a million robotic surgical procedures were carried out in the past year alone. The exceptionally high speeds of market penetration and expansion to new surgical areas had raised technical, clinical, and ethical concerns. However, from a technological perspective, surgical robots today are far from perfect, with a list of improvements expected for the next-generation systems. On the other hand, robotic technologies are flourishing at ever-faster paces. Without the inherent conservation and safety requirements in medicine, general robotic research could be substantially more agile and explorative. As a result, various technical innovations in robotics developed in recent years could potentially be grafted into surgical applications and ignite the next major advancement in robotic surgery. In this article, the current generation of surgical robots is reviewed from a technological point of view, including three of possibly the most debated technical topics in surgical robotics: vision, haptics, and accessibility. Further to that, several emerging robotic technologies are highlighted for their potential applications in next-generation robotic surgery

Singularities and symmetry breaking in swarms

A large-scale system consisting of self-propelled particles, moving under the directional alignment rule (DAR), can often self-organize to an ordered state that emerges from an initially rotationally symmetric configuration. It is commonly accepted that the DAR, which leads to effective long-range interactions, is the underlying mechanism contributing to the collective motion. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that a swarm under the DAR has unperceived and inherent singularities. Furthermore, we show that the compelled symmetry-breaking effects at or near the singularities, as well as the topological connectivity of the swarm in the evolution process, contribute fundamentally to the emergence of the collective behavior; and the elimination or weakening of singularities in the DAR will induce an unexpected sharp transition from coherent movement to isotropic dispersion. These results provide some insights into the fundamental issue of collective dynamics: What is the underlying mechanism causing the spontaneous symmetry breaking and leading to eventual coherent motion

Pathways for Uncertainty Quantification through Stochastic Damage Constitutive Models of Concrete

The constitutive model of concrete is of paramount significance for the design of concrete structures and the corresponding reliability assessment. In the present paper, the uniaxial damage model of concrete based on Chinese design code is introduced. It is noticed that there are seven crucial parameters in this model, while five of them are of physical significance and generally should be regarded as random variables. Therefore, the major task of the present paper is to study the effects, variations and randomness of these five parameters. Starting with the fuzzy analysis method (FAM), a brief uncertainty quantification scheme is described. This method is straightforward and easy to implement. Nevertheless, the prior knowledge (i.e., the engineering experience of designers or published literature) is required in FAM. Alternatively, the probability density evolution method (PDEM) is utilized with less needs of prior knowledge, while the type of marginal distribution of parameters is still required or assumed. Thus the epistemic uncertainty may be, more or less, brought in when applying these two methods. To improve this situation, i.e., to reduce the involvement of prior knowledge, a probabilistic learning method (PLM) is applied, in which the prior knowledge is reduced as it is nearly of data-driven background. The research results indicate that these three different methods of uncertainty quantification provide some basic and common conclusions, showing that all of them can capture the main characters of the experimental data. In addition, they individually offer various aspects of information due to different perspectives of these three methods. Therefore, these three methods might derive a series of powerful tools for uncertainty quantification in structural engineering, and be of future interest for opening new perspectives.Financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC Grant Nos. 51725804 and 11761131014) is greatly appreciated

A Common Variant in CLDN14 is Associated with Primary Biliary Cirrhosis and Bone Mineral Density.

Primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC), a chronic autoimmune liver disease, has been associated with increased incidence of osteoporosis. Intriguingly, two PBC susceptibility loci identified through genome-wide association studies are also involved in bone mineral density (BMD). These observations led us to investigate the genetic variants shared between PBC and BMD. We evaluated 72 genome-wide significant BMD SNPs for association with PBC using two European GWAS data sets (n = 8392), with replication of significant findings in a Chinese cohort (685 cases, 1152 controls). Our analysis identified a novel variant in the intron of the CLDN14 gene (rs170183, Pfdr = 0.015) after multiple testing correction. The three associated variants were followed-up in the Chinese cohort; one SNP rs170183 demonstrated consistent evidence of association in diverse ethnic populations (Pcombined = 2.43 × 10(-5)). Notably, expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) data revealed that rs170183 was correlated with a decline in CLDN14 expression in both lymphoblastoid cell lines and T cells (Padj = 0.003 and 0.016, respectively). In conclusion, our study identified a novel PBC susceptibility variant that has been shown to be strongly associated with BMD, highlighting the potential of pleiotropy to improve gene discovery

Similar ultrafast dynamics of several dissimilar Dirac and Weyl semimetals

Recent years have seen the rapid discovery of solids whose low-energy electrons have a massless, linear dispersion, such as Weyl, line-node, and Dirac semimetals. The remarkable optical properties predicted in these materials show their versatile potential for optoelectronic uses. However, little is known of their response in the picoseconds after absorbing a photon. Here we measure the ultrafast dynamics of four materials that share non-trivial band structure topology but that differ chemically, structurally, and in their low-energy band structures: ZrSiS, which hosts a Dirac line node and Dirac points; TaAs and NbP, which are Weyl semimetals; and Sr$_{1-y}$Mn$_{1-z}$Sb$_2$, in which Dirac fermions coexist with broken time-reversal symmetry. After photoexcitation by a short pulse, all four relax in two stages, first sub-picosecond, and then few-picosecond. Their rapid relaxation suggests that these and related materials may be suited for optical switches and fast infrared detectors. The complex change of refractive index shows that photoexcited carrier populations persist for a few picoseconds