Gastrointestinal (GI) cancers account for 1.5 million deaths worldwide. Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) is an advanced therapeutic endoscopy technique with superior clinical outcome due to the minimally invasive and en bloc removal of tumours. In the western world, ESD is seldom carried out, due to its complex and challenging nature. Various surgical systems are being developed to make this therapy accessible, however, these solutions have shown limited operational workspace, dexterity, or low force exertion capabilities. The current paper shows the ESD CYCLOPS system, a bimanual surgical robotic attachment that can be mounted at the end of any flexible endoscope. The system is able to achieve forces of up to 46N, and showed a mean error of 0.217mm during an elliptical tracing task. The workspace and instrument dexterity is shown by pre-clinical ex vivo trials, in which ESD is succesfully performed by a GI surgeon. The system is currently undergoing pre-clinical in vivo validation.

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Given the current shortage of respirator masks and the resulting lack of personal protective equipment for use by clinical staff, we examined bottom-up solutions that would allow hospitals to fabricate respirator masks that: (i) meet requirements in terms of filtering capacities, (ii) are easy to produce rapidly and locally, and (iii) can be constructed using materials commonly available in hospitals worldwide. We found that Halyard H300 material used for wrapping of surgical instruments and routinely available in hospitals, met these criteria. Specifically, three layers of material achieved a filter efficiency of 94%, 99%, and 100% for 0.3 μm, 0.5 μm, and 3.0 μm particles, respectively; importantly, these values are close to the efficiency provided by FFP2 and N95 masks. After re-sterilization up to 5 times, the filter’s efficiency remains sufficiently high for use as an FFP1 respirator mask. Finally, using only one layer of the material satisfies the criteria for use as a ‘surgical mask’. This material can therefore be used to help protect hospital staff and other healthcare professionals who require access to high quality masks but lack commercially available solutions.

This paper presents a tool that can help innovators to operationalize responsible research & innovation (RRI) in industry and offers decision support in their innovation project management. This tool is based on an earlier method of project quality assessment to identify innovative project success-related key performance indicators (KPIs). Based on real-world data and using structural equation modelling, a model is developed that relates the KPIs to one another and provides innovators with the opportunity to compare quality scores of current projects to a database of earlier successful and less successful project quality assessments. Building on this model, using a rapid prototyping approach based simulation and modelling, a scenario development tool has been developed that can predict success chances of current projects based on changing KPI score parameters. By highlighting the value of the KPIs in relation to RRI, and by elucidating what could be done to increase values of low scoring project KPIs, innovators who use the tool can evaluate possible actions they can deploy to increase the quality of their innovative projects, while simultaneously innovating in a more socially responsible way.

Surgical, Inc. ("Intuitive") (Nasdaq: ISRG), the pioneer and a global technology leader in robotic-assisted, minimally invasive surgery, today announced certain unaudited preliminary fourth quarter and full year 2018 financial results ahead of its participation at the