In the last 10 years, endovascular procedures have gained popularity, as an alternative to surgery, for the treatment of a variety of vascular diseases, including arterial aneurysms. Though their feasibility and their immediate efficacy in the prevention of aneurismal rupture has now been established, most endovascular interventions on aneurysms have significant drawbacks such as a significant incidence of residual lesions, deficient healing at the neck, or recurrences.

One of the major challenges in nano-robotics for biomedical applications is the design of a system and a propulsion method small enough to fit in blood vessels. The main difficulty is to establish power and miniaturization simultaniously. The project‟s long-term goal is to provide surgeons with a microdevice capable of being controlled small blood vessels. Some medical applications of such a microdevice are minimally invasive surgeries (MIS), such as angioplasties, biopsies or highly localized drug deliveries for chemotherapy. The smaller the device, the wider their operating range becomes through access to the finest blood vessels, such as capillaries. Our team understands the great potential of using a magnetic gradient as the director of the micro/nanorobot; thus, we are greatly interested in magnetic nanomaterials.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems provide adequate magnetic fields and gradients for propulsion and are already present in almost every hospital. Therefore, they were chosen as the magnetic field and gradients generator for the future microrobot that is referred to as MR-Sub (Magnetic Resonance Submarine). MR-Sub will be released by catheter and will be externally guided using control software that can track it, compute its trajectory and determine the necessary MRI gradients to be applied. The bionanorobot envisaged is a controllable system sufficiently small for endovascular applications.

We are interested in the treatment of scoliosis. This disease is a three-dimensional deformity of the trunk, characterized by a lateral deviation and axial rotation of the spine. Idiopathic scoliosis usually begins in middle childhood and tends to increase progressively during skeletal growth. In some cases, the scoliotic curve increases to such a degree that surgical treatment becomes necessary. Operations for idiopathic scoliosis are designed to correct the deformity and to prevent its progression by achieving a solid fusion. A good fusion is obtained by using Harrington or, more recently, Cotrel-Dubousset instrumentation, to stabilize the spine. However, no optimal results are achieved using these systems regarding 3D deformity of scoliosis.

Contrary to conventional sterilization techniques that cause some level of damage to the material, plasma-based sterilization techniques are adequate processes that present superior characteristics, such as short processing times, non-toxicity, and medium preservation. In such techniques, various gas mixtures can be used to produce the inactivation agents. Reactive species are generated through various collision pathways, such as electron impact excitation and dissolution. Reactive species, i.e. (O), Ozone (O3), Hydroxyl (OH), (NO2), (NO), etc., play an important role in all plasma-surface interactions. They greatly compromise the integrity of the cells of micro-organisms and have direct impact on their outermost membranes, which leads to eventual cell destruction.