Ethics

Summary

Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior". The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value; these fields comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology. Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. As a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, and value theory. Three major areas of study within ethics recognized today are:

Meta-ethics, concerning the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions, and how their truth values (if any) can be determined;

Normative ethics, concerning the practical means of determining a moral course of action;

Applied ethics, concerning what a person is obligated (or permitted) to do in a specific situation or

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics

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Haptic instrumentation for an interventional radiology simulator

Dejan Ilic

Low trauma, reduced costs and fast recovery are only a few factors why minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is taking over classical surgical methods. Interventional Radiology (IR) is a minimally invasive procedure where thin tubular instruments are steered through the patient's vascular system under X-ray imaging. In order to perform these procedures, a radiologist has to be trained to master hand-eye coordination, instrument manipulation and procedure protocols. The importance of training IR procedures rises with the increasing variety and sophistication of the procedures performed using this approach. Apart from the traditional "see one, do one, teach one" model, radiologists have only had few mock devices with limitations in practical use. Training on animals is an alternative, but its use is hindered by high costs and ethical issues. The existing simulation systems all have major drawbacks: the requirement to use modified instruments, high inertia of the haptic feedback that creates a noticeably degraded dynamic behavior, or excessive friction that is not properly compensated. In this thesis we propose a quality training environment dedicated to IR. The system is composed of a virtual reality (VR) simulation of the patients anatomy linked to a robotic interface providing haptic force feedback. This thesis focuses on the requirements, design and prototyping of a specific haptic interface for the manipulation of catheters and guide wires. Translational tracking and force feedback on the catheter are provided by two cylinders forming a friction drive arrangement. The complete friction drive can be set in rotation with an additional motor providing torque feedback. A force and a torque sensor are integrated in the cylinders for direct measurement on the catheter enabling disturbance cancellation with a closed-loop force control strategy. One of the specific requirements during a simulated intervention is to measure the position of the tip of a guide wire inside a catheter. This is a so called "tube in tube" problem. The guide wire is detected at the entrance of the simulator and then grasped by a micro-gripper. Forces and movements of the guidewire moving inside the catheter are then transmitted through a gripper and along a rod to an external unit. This thesis also reports a study of several micro-gripper designs developed and tested on a haptic force feedback interface developed at the LSRO-EPFL. A virtual reality environment has been developed to provide real-time visualisation and force feedback. Several different software routines are integrated in the system. During an IR procedure the tip of an employed instrument interacts with a wall of blood vessels and a repulsive force is transmitted to the user. Force feedback helps radiologist to orient and navigate the inserted instrument in the vessel. This thesis presents a novel method for measurement of internal constraints during an IR procedure. The measurements help to determine the maximum interaction forces between the catheter and the wall of the blood vessel and to observe the shape of dynamic interaction during manipulation. In order to recreate a realistic simulation environment it is necessary to derive the elastic properties and behavior of arteries when contact with an instrument occurs. A novel method for measurement of mechanical properties of blood vessels is proposed in this work. Information derived with this method is also very useful to determine coherent boundary conditions for hemodynamic simulations. Measurements of the modulus of elasticity of an artery are carried out by measuring the deformations due to the inflation of an angioplasty balloon catheter used for IR procedures. A test bench, consisting of an angioplasty balloon, a PVA model and an actuator used to inflate the balloon, is developed for realization of experiments. The pressure-volume curve during the inflation of the balloon is observed. The Young's modulus is derived with an analytical model of the measurement system. The results are then analyzed and compared to existing data from literature.

EPFL2005

Concerns over the ever-increasing production, availability and use of multilayered individual data in social research, business and the everyday life calls for the development of ethical and legal guidelines. In parallel to civic and governmental initiatives, Critical Data Studies offers a transdisciplinary academic platform to define a common ethical framework for computational research. Essays recently published under this label argue for lines of conduct guided by principles such as fairness and justice. Cultural and evolutionary anthropology, as well as political psychology show, however, those principles are mostly common to Northern liberal cultures. For example, Moral Foundation Theory identifies five cross-cultural grounds to ethical reasoning—Fairness, Care, Authority, In-group and Purity—the first two being associated with progressive views, and the three others with traditionalist views. In the current development of Critical Data Studies, the framing of research ethics by fairness and justice therefore risks to maintain, if not increase, the hegemony of Northern researchers on scientific productivity in Big Data research. In this poster, I present a novel framing of Big Data ethics, one that considers the cross-cultural diversity of human morality. My objective is to lay out a shared ground to an urging global approach to knowledge production. First, I review existing ethical framework of Big Data research and classify each proposal according to the Moral Foundation Theory. Second, I identify commonalities and gaps of proposed framework and articulate possible extension of each framework using the missing moral foundations as guiding principles. Finally, I propose a synthetic framework of Big Data ethics. The poster highlights the unbalance of ethical considerations in Big Data research, and in scientific production in general. The proposed framework points at ethical stances that could become major concerns in future research using Big Data for social research: Political or economic definition of scientific objectives, applications and limitations (authority); Exclusion of individuals, groups and communities in the production, publication and application of research findings (in-group); Constrains on inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations, research topics, methods of analysis, epistemic positioning and ontological grounds (purity).

2018

Teaching Transversal Skills in the Engineering Curriculum: the Need to Raise the Temperature

Lucille Delisle, Helena Kovacs, Mirjam Mekhaiel, Roland John Tormey, Pascal Vuilliomenet

Engineers and architects today are dealing with great social, technical and environmental complexities, and the demand for having broadly educated holistic engineers will only continue to grow in the future. Being able to manage and lead diverse teams, understand complex, interdisciplinary systems and solve open-ended problems across and beyond different subjects is expected from the next generation of graduates. With the aim to understand how the future graduates are educated to cope with such complexities, we developed a tool to map out the course curricula and examined the extent to which transversal skills are taught at a leading technical university in Europe. Using MATLAB, we have conducted an exploratory analysis, and this concept paper offers the outcomes of analysing course descriptions of bachelor and master programmes throughout the academic year 2018-2019. By presenting the results in a visual form of a heatmap, we have examined at which moment throughout the curriculum and how frequently are transversal skills included in the teaching objectives. The results indicate an overall gap between teaching transversal skills at both BA and MA level, but also a difference in teaching transversal skill in mandatory and optional courses. Furthermore, throughout the curriculum we observed a significant lack of some critical skills, such as those connected to ethical reasoning. This project opened valuable avenue to deepen the discussion regarding teaching and learning of transversal skills, as well as the structural changes that need to be considered in the education of the engineers and architects in future.

University of Twente2020

Haptic instrumentation for an interventional radiology simulator

Dejan Ilic

EPFL2005

2018