New MEMS Tweezers for the Viscoelastic Characterization of Soft Materials at the Microscale

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

• Level A · Stronger Clinical Evidence
• Level B · Emerging clinical evidence with positive signals
• Level C · Early human research exploring benefits
• Level D · Scientific groundwork from lab and animal studies
• Emerging · Emerging topic under active research

Abstract (original English)

As many studies show, there is a relation between the tissue's mechanical characteristics and some specific diseases. Knowing this relationship would help early diagnosis or microsurgery. In this paper, a new method for measuring the viscoelastic properties of soft materials at the microscale is proposed. This approach is based on the adoption of a microsystem whose mechanical structure can be reduced to a compliant four bar linkage where the connecting rod is substituted by the tissue sample. A procedure to identify both stiffness and damping coefficients of the tissue is then applied to the developed hardware. Particularly, stiffness is calculated solving the static equations of the mechanism in a desired configuration, while the damping coefficient is inferred from the dynamic equations, which are written under the hypothesis that the sample tissue is excited by a variable compression force characterized by a suitable wave form. The whole procedure is implemented by making use of a control system.

Evidence level

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

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