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BACKGROUND: Recently, cancer immunotherapy has become standard for cancer treatment. Immunotherapy not only treats primary tumors, but also prevents metastasis and recurrence, representing a major advantage over conventional cancer treatments. However, existing cancer immunotherapies have limited clinical benefits because cancer antigens are often not effectively delivered to immune cells. Furthermore, unlike lymphoma, solid tumors evade anti-cancer immunity by forming an immune-suppressive tumo

Fine needles facilitate diagnosis and therapy because they enable minimally invasive surgical interventions. This paper formulates the problem of steering a very flexible needle through firm tissue as a nonholonomic kinematics problem, and demonstrates how planning can be accomplished using diffusion-based motion planning on the Euclidean group, SE(3). In the present formulation, the tissue is treated as isotropic and no obstacles are present. The bevel tip of the needle is treated as a nonholon

Nanozymes are nanomaterials with similar catalytic activities to natural enzymes. Compared with natural enzymes, they have numerous advantages, including higher physiochemical stability, versatility, and suitability for mass production. In the past decade, the synthesis of nanozymes and their catalytic mechanisms have advanced beyond the simple replacement of natural enzymes, allowing for fascinating applications in various fields such as biosensing and disease treatment. In particular, the expl

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) based upon the use of light and photosensitizers (PSs) has been used as a novel treatment approach for a variety of tumors. It, however, has several major limitations in the clinic: poor water solubility, long-term phototoxicity, low tumor targeting efficacy, and limited light penetration. With advances in nanotechnology, materials science, and clinical interventional imaging procedures, various smart-PSs have been developed for improving their cancer-therapeutic effic

The continuous development of drug delivery systems ( DDSs ) has been extensively researched by the need to maximize therapeutic efficacy while minimizing undesirable side effects. Nanoparticle technology was recently shown to hold great promise for drug delivery applications in nanomedicine due to its beneficial properties, such as better encapsulation, bioavailability, control release, and lower toxic effect. Despite the great progress in nanomedicine, there remain many limitations for clinica

A nonholonomic system subjected to external noise from the environment, or internal noise in its own actuators, will evolve in a stochastic manner described by an ensemble of trajectories. This ensemble of trajectories is equivalent to the solution of a Fokker-Planck equation that typically evolves on a Lie group. If the most likely state of such a system is to be estimated, and plans for subsequent motions from the current state are to be made so as to move the system to a desired state with hi

Transcatheter hepatic intra-arterial (IA) injection has been considered as an effective targeted delivery technique for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Recently, drug-eluting beads (DEB) were developed for transcatheter IA delivery to HCC. However, the conventional DEB has offered relatively modest survival benefits. It can be difficult to control drug loading/release from DEB and to monitor selective delivery to the targeted tumors. Embolized DEBs in hepatic arteries frequently induce hypoxic a

by magnetic resonance imaging. Thus, cNP-mediated activation of NK cells has great potential as an NK cell-based cancer immunotherapy. Most of all, activating NK cells using cNPs has a great advantage over conventional methods in that immune cells can be activated by a one-step facile process with exogenously charged nanomaterials, without the need for genetic engineering or cytokine treatment.

In this paper we develop a new framework for path planning of flexible needles with bevel tips. Based on a stochastic model of needle steering, the probability density function for the needle tip pose is approximated as a Gaussian. The means and covariances are estimated using an error propagation algorithm which has second order accuracy. Then we adapt the path-of-probability (POP) algorithm to path planning of flexible needles with bevel tips. We demonstrate how our planning algorithm can be u