Jenny Dankelman

Delft University of Technology | TU · Department of Biomechanical Engineering

Introduction Weekly head circumference (HC) measurements using a measuring tape is the current standard for longitudinal brain growth monitoring of preterm infants. The MONITOR3D (M3D) 3D scanner has been developed to measure both HC and cranial volume (CrV) of preterm infants within incubators. The M3D’s usability, accuracy and precision were vali...

Objectives To study the methodology and results of studies assessing the relationship between fetal heart rate and specified neonatal outcomes including, heart rate, infection, necrotizing enterocolitis, intraventricular hemorrhage, hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, and seizure. Methods Embase, Medline ALL, Web of Science Core Collection, Cochrane...

Purpose. Patient-tailored intracavitary/interstitial (IC/IS) brachytherapy (BT) applicators may increase dose conformity in cervical cancer patients. Current configuration planning methods in these custom applicators rely on manual specification or a small set of (straight) needles. This work introduces and validates a two-stage approach for establ...

The article is about sterilization of laparoscopic surgical instruments in rural areas and new suggested methods

Manipulating a flexible ureteroscope is difficult, due to its bendable body and hand–eye coordination problems, especially when exploring the lower pole of the kidney. Though robotic interventions have been adopted in various clinical scenarios, they are rarely used in ureteroscopy. This study proposes a teleoperation system consists of a soft robo...

Laparoscopic surgery offers significant benefits to patients in low-resource settings compared to open surgery such as faster recovery, less pain and lower infection rate. However, there exist significant barriers to the safe introduction of laparoscopy such as high costs and limited availability of trained staff. LMIC hospitals suffer from higher...

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Objective: Navigation through tortuous and deformable vessels using catheters with limited steering capability underscores the need for reliable path planning. State-of-the-art path planners do not fully account for the deformable nature of the environ...

Endovascular interventions are minimally invasive procedures that utilize the vascular system to access anatomical regions deep within the body. Image-guided assistance provides valuable real-time information about the dynamic state of the vascular environment. However, the reliance on intra-operative 2D fluoroscopy images limits depth perception,...

A Chronic Total Occlusion (CTO) is a type of arte- rial blockage, which has persisted for more than three months, affecting the coronary arteries of the heart. Traditionally, CTO is treated by making a large incision in the chest area. This is a highly invasive procedure. Instead, catheter based approaches offer smaller inci- sions and exploit the...

Objective: Hemodialysis patients usually receive an arteriovenous fistula (AVF) in the arm as vascular access conduit to allow dialysis 2-3 times a week. This AVF introduces the high flow necessary for dialysis, but over time the ever-present supraphysiological flow is the leading cause of complications. This study aims to develop an implantable de...

Collision feedback about instrument and environment interaction is often lacking in robotic surgery training devices. The PoLaRS virtual reality simulator is a newly developed desk trainer that overcomes drawbacks of existing robot trainers for advanced laparoscopy. This study aimed to assess the effect of haptic and visual feedback during training...

Objective: Cemented total hip arthroplasty (THA) demonstrates superior survival rates compared to uncemented procedures. Nevertheless, most younger patients opt for uncemented THA, as removing well-fixed bone cement in the femur during revisions is complex, particularly the distal cement plug. This removal procedure often increases the risk of femo...

Endovascular intervention is a minimally invasive method for treating cardiovascular diseases. Although fluoroscopy, known for real-time catheter visualization, is commonly used, it exposes patients and physicians to ionizing radiation and lacks depth perception due to its 2D nature. To address these limitations, a study was conducted using teleope...

Objective: Detecting the cancerous growth margin and achieving a negative margin is one of the challenges that surgeons face during cancer procedures. A smart electrosurgical knife with integrated optical fibers has been designed previously to enable real-time use of diffuse reflectance spectroscopy for intraoperative margin assessment. In this pap...

Background The steep radiation dose gradients in cervical cancer brachytherapy (BT) necessitate a thorough understanding of the behavior of afterloader source cables or needles in the curved channels of (patient‐tailored) applicators. Purpose The purpose of this study is to develop and validate computer models to simulate: (1) BT source positions,...

Introduction In clinical practice, fetal heart rate monitoring is performed intermittently using Doppler ultrasound, typically for 30 minutes. In case of a non‐reassuring heart rate pattern, monitoring is usually prolonged. Noninvasive fetal electrocardiography may be more suitable for prolonged monitoring due to improved patient comfort and signal...

Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy (DRS) can provide tissue feedback for pedicle screw placement in spine surgery, yet the integration of fiber optics into the tip of the pedicle probe, a device used to pierce through bone, is challenging, since the optical probing depth and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are affected negatively compared to those of a b...

Introduction For women diagnosed with advanced-stage epithelial ovarian cancer, complete cytoreductive surgery (CRS) is the most powerful independent parameter for prolonged survival. An intraoperative imaging technique to detect tumor deposits could help achieve complete CRS. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) provides information on tissue composition,...

Introduction: Based on the success of the former “Shaft-Actuated, Tip-Articulated” SATA-Drive, a prototype robotic instrument driver for modular, steerable, laparoscopic instruments, a new driver is designed and tested to improve previously lacking features concerning cleanability, instrument adaptation, practical application and control. The desig...

Inflicted head injury by shaking trauma (IHI-ST) in infants is a type of abusive head trauma often simulated computationally to investigate causalities between violent shaking and injury. This is commonly done with the head’s rotation center kept fixed over time. However, due to the flexibility of the infant’s neck and the external shaking motion i...

Objectives: Normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) provides a platform for pre-transplant kidney quality assessment that is essential for the use of marginal donor kidneys. Laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) presents distinct advantages as a real-time and noncontact imaging technique for measuring microcirculation. In this study, we aimed to asse...

Increased demand for less invasive procedures has accelerated the adoption of Intraluminal Procedures (IP) and Endovascular Interventions (EI) performed through body lumens and vessels. As navigation through lumens and vessels is quite complex, interest grows to establish autonomous navigation techniques for IP and EI for reaching the target area....

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Objective : In laparoscopic surgery, quality of haptic feedback is reduced compared to conventional surgery, leading to unintentional tissue damage during grasping. From the perspective of haptics, poor mechanical design of laparoscopic instrument join...

Background Surgical process model (SPM) analysis is a great means to predict the surgical steps in a procedure as well as to predict the potential impact of new technologies. Especially in complicated and high-volume treatments, such as parenchyma sparing laparoscopic liver resection (LLR), profound process knowledge is essential for enabling impro...

In laparoscopic surgery the abdominal cavity is insufflated with pressurized carbon dioxide gas to create workspace. This pressure is exerted through the diaphragm onto the lungs, competing with ventilation and hampering it. In clinical practice the difficulty of optimizing this balance can lead to the application of harmfully high pressures. This...

Vacuum-Assisted wound care (VAC) is effective for treating complex wounds, but is hardly available in low-resource settings. An affordable, portable and safe VAC device was developed to treat patients with chronic and complex wounds: the Wound Care (WOCA) Pump. The WOCA safely controls the pressure accurately (+/- 10%) between -70 and -125 mmHg for...

Unlabelled: Veress needles (VN) are commonly used in establishing pneumoperitoneum in laparoscopic surgery. Previously, a VN with a new safety mechanism 'VeressPLUS' needle (VN+) was developed to reduce the amount of overshoot. Methods: Eighteen participants (novices, intermediates, and experts) performed in total of 248 insertions in a systemat...

Accuracy in spinal fusion varies greatly depending on the experience of the physician. Real-time tissue feedback with diffuse reflectance spectroscopy has been shown to provide cortical breach detection using a conventional probe with two parallel fibers. In this study, Monte Carlo simulations and optical phantom experiments were conducted to inves...

Introduction: Most robotic instruments and their drives still risk residual contamination due to cleaning complexities, rendering them limited reusable, and tend to have larger instruments than the 5mm laparoscopic standard. The novel steerable laparoscopic SATA-LRS uses modularity for cleanability and exchangeability. The SATA-Drive: a robotic dri...

In this study, a novel anthropomorphic head phantom for quantitative image quality assessment in cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) is proposed. The phantom is composed of tissue equivalent materials (TEMs) which are suitable for cost-efficient fabrication methods such as silicone casting and 3D printing. A monocalcium phosphate/gypsum mixture (M...

A major challenge during autonomous navigation in endovascular interventions is the complexity of operating in a deformable but constrained workspace with an instrument. Simulation of deformations for it can provide a cost-effective training platform for path planning. Aim of this study is to develop a realistic, auto-adaptive, and visually plausib...

Introduction Disposable instruments in healthcare have led to a significant increase of medical waste. The aim of this study is to validate the recycling of disposable Zamak laryngoscope blades into new medical components by using a new ‘all-in-one’ affordable reprocessing setup as alternative for die-casting. Methods A n “all-in-one” casting set-...

The purpose of this study was to describe a new method to effectively improve the environmental impact of operating rooms through a systematic approach. A proven successful prospective risk analysis tool to improve the safety of complex healthcare processes (Healthcare Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) was adapted to reduce the environmental impact...

Surgical process modelling is an innovative approach that aims to simplify the challenges involved in improving surgeries through quantitative analysis of a well-established model of surgical activities. In this paper, surgical process model strategies are applied for the analysis of different Minimally Invasive Liver Treatments (MILTs), including...

In cardiovascular interventions, when steering catheters and especially robotic catheters, great care should be paid to prevent applying too large forces on the vessel walls as this could dislodge calcifications, induce scars or even cause perforation. To address this challenge, this paper presents a novel compliant motion control algorithm that re...

Introduction Ductoscopy is a minimally invasive micro-endoscopic approach for direct visualization of intraductal lesions of the breast. Challenges of ductoscopy are low sensitivity for detecting malignancy, the lack of a proper intraductal biopsy device, and adequate treatment of intraductal lesions. This study will analyze three new approaches to...

Purpose Navigational strategies create a scenario whereby percutaneous needle-based interventions of the liver can be guided using both pre-interventional 3D imaging datasets and dynamic interventional ultrasound (US). To score how such technologies impact the needle placement process, we performed kinematic analysis on different user groups. Meth...

Navigation inside luminal organs is an arduous task that requires non-intuitive coordination between the movement of the operator's hand and the information obtained from the endoscopic video. The development of tools to automate certain tasks could alleviate the physical and mental load of doctors during interventions, allowing them to focus on di...

bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background: In hip arthroplasties, surgeons rely on their experience to assess the stability and balance of hip tissues when fitting the implant to their patients. During the operation, surgeons use a modular, temporary set of implants to feel the tensio...

The complexity of handheld steerable laparoscopic instruments (SLI) may impair the learning curve compared to conventional instruments when first utilized. This study aimed to provide the current state of interest in the use of SLI, the current use of these in daily practice and the type of training which is conducted before using SLI in the operat...

Emerging intraoperative tumor margin assessment techniques require the development of more complex and reliable organ phantoms to assess the performance of the technique before its translation into the clinic. In this work, electrically conductive tissue-mimicking materials (TMMs) based on fat, water and agar/gelatin were produced with tunable opti...

Introduction: Steering light is relevant to many medical applications that require tissue illumination, sensing, or modification. To control the propagation direction of light beams, a great variety of innovative fiber-optic medical devices have been designed. Areas covered: This review provides a comprehensive overview of the patent literature...

The most important prognostic factor for the survival of advanced-stage epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the completeness of cytoreductive surgery (CRS). Therefore, an intraoperative technique to detect microscopic tumors would be of great value. The aim of this pilot study is to assess the feasibility of near-infrared hyperspectral imaging (HSI)...

The success of total hip arthroplasty depends on the experience of the surgeon, and one of the ways the surgeon currently determines the final implant insertion depth is to listen to the change in audible pitch of the hammering sound. We investigated the use of vibration emissions as a novel method for insertion quality assessment. A non-invasive c...

Introduction: Disposable instruments in healthcare have led to a significant increase of medical waste. The aim of this study is to validate the recycling of disposable Zamak laryngoscope blades into new medical products by using a new ‘all-in-one’ affordable reprocessing setup as alternative for die-casting. Methods: An “all-in-one” casting set-up...

Background: Hospitals in low resource settings (LRS) can benefit from modern laparoscopic methodologies. However, cleaning, maintenance and costs requirements play a stronger role while training and technology are less available. Steerable laparoscopic instruments have additional requirements in these settings and need extra identified adaptations...

Introduction Disposable instruments in healthcare have led to a significant increase of medical waste. The aim of this study is to validate the recycling of disposable Zamak laryngoscope blades into new medical products by using a new ‘all-in-one’ affordable reprocessing setup as alternative for die-casting. Methods An “all-in-one” casting set-up w...

In this article, a deep learning method for the shape sensing of continuum robots based on multicore fiber bragg grating (FBG) fiber is introduced. The proposed method, based on an artificial neural network (ANN), differs from traditional approaches, where accurate shape reconstruction requires a tedious characterization of many characteristic para...

The success of total hip arthroplasty depends on the experience of the surgeon, and one of the ways the surgeon currently determines the final implant insertion depth is to listen to the change in audible pitch of the hammering sound. We investigated the use of acoustic vibration emissions as a novel method for insertion quality assessment. A non-i...

p>Inexperienced surgeons undertaking hip arthroplasties are twice as likely to experience errors than their experienced colleagues, leading to dislocations, pain and discomfort for the patients. To address this issue, a new 3DOF force measurement system was developed and integrated in multiple new prototypes able to measure forces and movements int...