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Abstract
A medical device is any apparatus, appliance, software, or material intended to be used to assist clinicians in diagnosing medical conditions, performing surgical operations, or delivering rehabilitation services. The main goal in designing new medical devices is to create more precise and less invasive methods. The advancement of medical devices has led to many commercialized robotic systems for many applications such as surgical operations, planning and simulation, minimal damage precise positioning, minimally invasive diagnosis and detection, and new types of surgery treatments. Conventional medical devices are made of rigid materials that limit their ability to elastically deform and adapt their shape to external constraints and obstacles. These rigid devices are not ideal for many medical applications since they have the potential to damage human tissue with minimal unintentional contact. In contrast to conventional rigid devices, non-rigid devices contain little or no rigid material and are instead primarily composed of fluids, gels, soft polymers, and other easily deformable matter. Additionally, non-rigid devices can be derived from the implementation of origami techniques to form complex three-dimensional structures which can be optimized for working within space constrained environments. The work described in this dissertation aims to advance the field of medical devices through the design and development of novel non-rigid diagnostic and interventional medical devices. Through the examination of material properties of a composition of soft plastic, human fatty tissue was imitated to produce an abdominal biopsy phantom for training medical practitioners in CT-guided intervention. Diagnostic devices were developed using origami techniques for creating joints actuated by shape memory alloy and by 3D printing modular soft robotic pneumatic actuators. Origami was also used for developing a foldable structure for housing MRI receiver coils for use in interventional intracardiac catheterization to improve medical imaging capabilities during ablation of abnormal heart tissue in patients with atrial fibrillation.