🎓 Congratulations Dr. Flavie Przybylski!

Proud moment! Huge congratulations to Dr. Flavie Przybylski for the outstanding defense of her PhD thesis on soft robotic endoscopes for minimally invasive surgery.

The thesis — “Design, Modeling and Development of a Soft Surgical Endoscopic Robot” — tackles a real clinical challenge: conventional rigid catheters can damage arteries during procedures like transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI). Flavie’s work proposes an elegant alternative: a soft eversion-based robot whose membrane unfolds under internal pressure, 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 exceptional international jury:

• 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)

Seeing Flavie grow as a researcher over these years — from early prototype struggles to cadaveric validation — has been a privilege especially having to remotely collaborate between Nice and Lille.

Congratulations Dr. Przybylski — well deserved! Looking forward to seeing the impact of this work on the future of minimally invasive surgery and enjoy your future position at Caranx Medical.