Currently, the most common method for detecting prosthetic implant loosening is imaging. Unfortunately, imaging methods are imprecise in detecting the early signs of implant loosening. This paper describes a new wireless inductive proximity sensor system for detecting early implant loosening. The loosening of the implant is accurately detected by analyzing the electromagnetic field generated by the passive sensors located around the implant. The sensor system was modeled and simulated using COMSOL, and then tested experimentally. The inductive proximity sensor and the metallic implant form a coupled circuit is tuned to oscillate at a designed frequency. The circuit's integrated controller measures and records specific sensor's parameters such as resistance and inductance of the sensor that are directly related to the distance between the sensor system and the implant. A prototype has been developed and the results show that the designed proximity sensor is capable of measuring the loosening of the hip implant at 50μm resolution at distances of less than 8mm, and of 100μm resolution at a distance of 15mm. Furthermore, there is a good correlation between the simulated and experimental results.

Biomedical robotic systems continue to hold unlimited potential for surgical procedures. Robotized laser endoscopic tools provide surgeons with increased accuracy in the laser ablation of tissue and tumors. The research here catalogs the design and implementation of a new laser endoscopic tool for tissue ablation. A novel feature of this new device is the inclusion of a feedback loop that measures the position of the laser beam via a photodetector sensor. The scale of this new device was governed by the dimensions of the photodetector sensor. The tip of the laser's fiber optic cable is controlled by the torque interaction between permanent magnet rings surrounding the fiber-optic and the custom-designed solenoid coils. Prior to building the physical test-bed, the system was modeled and simulated using comsol software. In preclinical trials, the physical experimental results showed that the designed prototype laser scanner system accurately tracks different ablation patterns and gives a consistent output position for the laser beam; however, the heat diffusion into the tissue around the desired line of the geometric shape would give wider ablation margins than was desirable.

Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) have emerged as a powerful class of algorithms that is highly suitable for noisy quantum devices. Therefore, investigating their design has become key in quantum computing research. Previous works have shown that choosing an effective parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) or ansatz for VQAs is crucial to their overall performance, especially on near-term devices. In this paper, we utilize pulse-level access to quantum machines and our understanding of their two-qubit interactions to optimize the design of two-qubit entanglers in a manner suitable for VQAs. Our analysis results show that pulse-optimized ansatze reduce state preparation times by more than half, maintain expressibility relative to standard PQCs, and are more trainable through local cost function analysis. Our algorithm performance results show that in three cases, our PQC configuration outperforms the base implementation. Our algorithm performance results, executed on IBM Quantum hardware, demonstrate that our pulse-optimized PQC configurations are more capable of solving MaxCut and Chemistry problems compared to a standard configuration.