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Acute Megakaryoblastic Leukemia (AMkL) is a rare disease that represents 5% of all reported AML cases and is diagnosed with high frequency in children with Down Syndrome and elderly people. M7-AMkL is characterized by a low overall survival and the patients have poor outcome to treatment, thus alternative treatments, such as CAR T cell therapies, are a need for better patient management.

Lung cancer is the most common cancer globally with over 2 million new cases diagnosed every year. Fortunately, if caught early, the likelihood of survival is greatly improved. If diagnosed in Stage I, survival rates are >75% over 5 years, vs. just 1% if diagnosed in Stage IV. Early diagnosis requires finding and sampling (biopsy) small, peripheral nodules that are located in the parenchima of the lung and predominately outside small airways. Currently, for early diagnosis a bronchoscope is inserted into the lung airway but due to large size it cannot reach the small airways. Therefore, the doctor has to advance a sharp biopsy needle blindly from the tip of the bronchoscope and into the lung tissue in the approximate direction of the nodule. This blind procedure has low accuracy and carries a high risk of misdiagnosis. Currently, to improve the accuracy, real time x-ray (fluoroscopy) is use which causes exposure of the patient and physician to harmful radiation. Computer and image assisted surgery and medical robotics present viable solutions but are not optimal at present. The scope of our research was to develop a robotic solution for increased precision and accuracy of early diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer, to increase procedure success rate, decrease patient radiation and stress exposure, and reduce the procedure cost. For this purpose, we developed an advanced prototype of a robotic system which is small in size, easy to use and effective. To demonstrate its effectiveness in navigating to peripheral small size lung cancer lesions, we performed laboratory tests or a realistic lung airway model. The preliminary tests of a novel medical robot using a complex lung airway model proved that our catheter driving robotic system is working as designed and allows navigation, through a complex 3D channels structure like the bronchial tree, in both manipulator and robotic modes without fluoroscopy scanning. The robotic system is more precise and stable, and can avoid patient injury and instrument damage due to accidental impact with the airway wall. Because it could be controlled from a different room via the software platform, using this robotic system can drastically reduce radiation exposure of the patient and totally avoid the exposure of the doctor. Another benefit of the proposed robotic system is that it uses currently available catheters in which a reusable electromagnetic guide wire is temporarily inserted to guide the tip of the catheter towards hard to reach targets. After the target is confirmed, the sensor can be retracted and the catheter can be used for its routine function such as biopsy collection. Future development will include placement of a force sensor at the tip of the catheter to “feel” the wall and adapt the speed of insertion in order to avoid wall damage and an improved algorithm to increase the speed in the automatic mode.

It is accepted so far that the formation of photonic nanojets requires the use of large dielectric spheres (several wavelengths in diameter). Here we show both numerically and experimentally that similar effects can be obtained with properly engineered sub-wavelength core-shell colloids. The design of the spheres is strongly inspired by a far-field approach for the generation of Bessel beams.

We present and discuss on bismuth oxide films grown on cost-efficient BK7 glass slides by pulsed laser deposition using a metallic target. Our choice is of particular interest due to the high number of intermediate bismuth oxides that can form during the oxidation process, along with the polymorphs of the stoichiometric oxide, i.e. bismuth trioxide (Bi2O3). We show that the oxidation degree of bismuth increases with substrate temperature, tS(300-600 °C), when grown in 100 sccm flow at 6 × 10−1mbar O2partial pressure. Thin film crystallinity is also increased with tS, as expected. Instead, the refractive index (n) of the films decreases in the visible range, as tSis increased. Furthermore, the transmittance of the films increases with tSto over 60%, especially in the red and near-infrared region (above 600 nm). As a final point, the results are discussed and compared to literature.