The gold standard treatment for bladder cancer is radical cystectomy that implies bladder removal coupled to urinary diversions. Despite the serious complications and the impossibility of controlled active voiding, bladder substitution with artificial systems is a challenge and cannot represent a real option, yet. In this article, we present hydraulic artificial detrusor prototypes to control and drive the voiding of an artificial bladder (AB). These prototypes rely on two actuator designs (origami and bellows) based either on negative or positive operating pressure, to be combined with an AB structure. Based on the bladder geometry and size, we optimized the actuators in terms of contraction/expansion performances, minimizing the liquid volume required for actuation and exploring different actuator arrangements to maximize the voiding efficiency. To operate the actuators, an ad hoc electrohydraulic circuit was developed for transferring liquid between the actuators and a reservoir, both of them intended to be implanted. The AB, actuators, and reservoir were fabricated with biocompatible flexible thermoplastic materials by a heat-sealing process. We assessed the voiding efficiency with benchtop experiments by varying the actuator type and arrangement at different simulated patient positions (horizontal, 45° tilted, and vertical) to identify the optimal configuration and actuation strategy. The most efficient solution relies on two bellows actuators anchored to the AB. This artificial detrusor design resulted in a voiding efficiency of about 99%, 99%, and 89%, in the vertical, 45° tilted, and horizontal positions, respectively. The relative voiding time was reduced by about 17, 24, and 55 s compared with the unactuated bladder.

As a permanent solution for patients who cannot contract their urinary bladder, an artificial detrusor muscle appears a higher outcome approach compared to current sacral neurostimulators featured by severe long-term side effects. In this paper, a novel soft robotic detrusor is presented to overcome the limitations of the state-of-the-art solutions. It is based on two identical origami-based hydraulic actuators, which completely surround the bladder and contract upon water aspiration. Design, manufacturing, and experimental characterization both in terms of contraction capabilities and voiding efficiency on ex vivo swine bladders are reported for two different origami geometries, as well as a proof-of-concept implementation of an autonomous driving circuit as control unit. Results from assisted urination tests outlined very good performances proving an active voiding efficiency of the hydraulic soft robotic detrusor equal to 84.8% $\pm 7.4\%$ in simulated environment.

The human brain is a complex system consisting of interconnections between different neurons and regions creating networks, known as Brain Networks. Of particular relevance in this context are Resting State Networks (RSNs), which are synchronous fluctuations between spatially distinct regions, occurring in the absence of a task or stimulus. Neuroscientists have identified alterations in RSNs in many neurodegenerative diseases, thus a long-term analysis of them is fundamental to monitor alterations in brain functional connectivity. However, the statistical tools in charge of analyzing RSNs currently fail in reaching significant levels of throughput, due to the huge amount of data to process. For this reason, this paper presents a hardware acceleration on FPGA design of the Independent Component Analysis (ICA), a state-of-the-art statistical method for RSNs recognition, in order to accelerate the data analysis process. We evaluated and deployed our implementation on Amazon F1 instances. The experimental evaluation shows that our hardware implementation is able to outperform GIFT, one of the most commonly used tools to identify RSNs, by a factor of 5×.