Electrothermally Driven Hydrogel-on-Flex-Circuit Actuator for Smart Steerable Catheters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reports an active catheter-tip device functionalized by integrating a temperature-responsive smart polymer onto a microfabricated flexible heater strip, targeting at enabling the controlled steering of catheters through complex vascular networks. A bimorph-like strip structure is enabled by photo-polymerizing a layer of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) hydrogel (PNIPAM), on top of a 20 × 3.5 mm2 flexible polyimide film that embeds a micropatterned heater fabricated using a low-cost flex-circuit manufacturing process. The heater activation stimulates the PNIPAM layer to shrink and bend the tip structure. The bending angle is shown to be adjustable with the amount of power fed to the device, proving the device’s feasibility to provide the integrated catheter with a controlled steering ability for a wide range of navigation angles. The powered device exhibits uniform heat distribution across the entire PNIPAM layer, with a temperature variation of <2 °C. The operation of fabricated prototypes assembled on commercial catheter tubes demonstrates their bending angles of up to 200°, significantly larger than those reported with other smart-material-based steerable catheters. The temporal responses and bending forces of their actuations are also characterized to reveal consistent and reproducible behaviors. This proof-of-concept study verifies the promising features of the prototyped approach to the targeted application area.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".