🎓 Congratulations Dr. Flavie Przybylski!

Dr. Flavie Przybylski has successfully defended her PhD thesis on soft robotic endoscopes for minimally invasive surgery.

The thesis — “Design, Modeling and Development of a Soft Surgical Endoscopic Robot” — addresses a genuine clinical challenge: conventional rigid catheters can damage arteries during procedures such as transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI). The work proposes a soft eversion-based robot whose membrane unfolds under internal pressure, thereby drastically reducing friction and enabling safer navigation through complex vascular anatomies.

Key contributions include:

• A numerical simulation model (built in SOFA Framework) to characterize materials and predict deployment behavior
• Identification of thermoplastic polyurethane as the optimal membrane material for compliance and atraumatic pressure profiles
• A complete experimental validation pipeline — from synthetic vascular phantoms to preclinical trials on cadaveric and porcine models

The work was carried out under the supervision of Christian Duriez (Inria) and Pierre Berthet-Rayne (Caranx Medical), with Yinoussa Adagolodjo and myself as co-supervisors.

Flavie defended before an international jury composed of:

• Kaspar Althoefer, Queen Mary University of London (Reviewer)
• Vincent Lebastard, IMT Atlantique / LS2N (Reviewer)
• Tania Morimoto, UC San Diego (Examiner)
• Christos Bergeles, King’s College London (Examiner)

Following Flavie’s development as a researcher over the course of these years — from early prototype challenges to cadaveric validation, and in the context of remote collaboration between Nice and Lille — has been a genuine privilege. The impact of this work on minimally invasive surgery is awaited with anticipation, as Dr. Przybylski takes up her future position at Caranx Medical.