Despite the recent advances in continuum robots for minimally invasive surgery or interventions, their applications to endovascular neurosurgery have remained technically challenging due to the difficulty of miniaturization. Aimed at enabling robotic applications to neurovascular interventions for endovascular treatments of stroke or brain aneurysms, we present a telerobotically controlled magnetic soft continuum robot capable of active steering and navigation under externally applied magnetic fields. For magnetic steering, a seven-degree-of-freedom (7-DOF) serial manipulator is employed to place an actuating magnet that can be manipulated via real-time teleoperation of the robot arm. A motorized linear drive is used to advance or retract the magnetic soft continuum robot, the distal tip of which is steered by the actuating magnet to enable endovascular navigation in the complex cerebral vasculature. We demonstrate the system's ability to guide selective navigation in different branches of cerebral arteries using anatomical models under visual feedback. We also compare the navigational performance of our system with that of a manually controlled passive guidewire and a conventional magnet-tipped guidewire. We found that the telerobotically controlled magnetic soft continuum robot allows for safer and quicker access to hard-to-reach areas in clinically challenging anatomies by enabling smooth navigation in narrow and winding pathways.

The MANET (mobile ad hoc networks) has suffered from many security problems despite of its advantages such as supporting the mobility of nodes, independence of the fixed infrastructure, and quick network establishment. In particular, especially when establishing security, the traditional certification services have many difficult problems in applying to the MANET because of its safety, expandability, and usability. In this paper, a secure and effective distributed certification service method was proposed using the secret sharing scheme and the threshold digital signature scheme in providing certification services in the MANET. In the proposed distributed certification service, certain nodes of relatively high safety among the mobile nodes consisting of the MANET were set as privileged nodes, from which the process of issuing a certification started. The proposed scheme copes with the problem that the whole network security would be damaged by the intrusion to one node in the centralized architecture and the hierarchical architecture scheme. Also, as the number of the nodes containing the partial confidential information of personal keys decreases, the risk of exposure of the private keys also in the fully distributed architecture decreases as well. By the network simulation, the features and availability of the proposed scheme were evaluated and analyzed in relation between the system parameters

Web services facilitate the creation of business process solutions in an efficient, standard way. The process solutions development with Web services requires the automation of discovery and composition of Web services. In this paper, we focus on the discovery of Web services based on the capabilities and properties of published services, and the composition of processes based on the requirements of submitted requests. We propose a solution which comprises multiple matching algorithms, first, a micro-level matching algorithm which matches the capabilities of services with activities in a process request, and, second, macro-level matching algorithms which are used to compose a business process by identifying services that satisfy the business requirements and constraints of the request. The solution from the macro-level matching algorithms is optimal in terms of meeting a certain business objective, e.g., minimizing the cost or execution time, or maximizing the total utility value of business properties of interest.