In minimally invasive surgeries such as vascular intervention and gastrointestinal endoscopy, traditional imaging techniques such as CT and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) can provide some "navigation" information, but the equipment is large, dependent on specific surgical environments, and mostly can only provide two-dimensional information. How to introduce magnetic field positioning technology for real-time and accurate 3D "navigation" of medical devices? This is one of the key research directions for scientists in the fields of electromagnetics and sensing in recent years. On February 4, Xu Tiantian, a researcher from the Integration Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, and Lu Haojian, a researcher from Zhejiang University, published the latest research results on Nature Sensor. The collaborative team has developed a flexible magnetic positioning patch system that can be attached and customized, and has developed a "two-stage magnetic positioning" strategy, which is expected to provide a new strategy for high-precision and real-time tracking of medical instruments in minimally invasive surgery. The research team first developed a flexible magnetic positioning patch that can be attached and customized. This patch is based on a flexible printed circuit board and has a lightweight and flexible overall structure. It can be designed in different shapes and sizes according to specific needs, and can be attached to the surface of the skin or integrated into the surface of medical devices such as probes and endoscopes. It can be used immediately, just like installing a "flexible navigation system", providing precise guidance for operating medical devices. Based on this flexible patch, researchers have further developed a two-stage positioning algorithm, which is similar to the "base station assisted positioning" function in satellite navigation systems. Firstly, the position of the flexible patch in the global coordinate system is determined through an external magnetic field, and then the patch is used as a local reference to achieve the positioning of small magnetic targets inside the body. In clinical environments with diverse surgical sites and complex medical device intervention pathways, traditional magnetic positioning technology relying on rigid sensor arrays with fixed positions often faces the dilemma of difficult to achieve both 'positioning accuracy' and 'workspace'. ”Xu Tiantian introduced. The magnetic positioning strategy proposed by the team uses flexible magnetic sensing patches as intermediate units, which expands the deployment of traditional magnetic positioning and effectively enhances its adaptability to complex clinical scenarios. The research team further conducted systematic validation of the method. The relevant research results indicate that this magnetic positioning strategy has good stability and universality in different applications such as surgical intervention navigation and in vitro physiological monitoring, providing a more flexible and clinically relevant implementation path for magnetic positioning systems. We hope to demonstrate that magnetic positioning can not only be accurately measured in controlled environments, but also be useful in real in vivo environments. ”Xu Tiantian stated that in the future, the team will focus on the "two-stage magnetic positioning strategy" and further explore the application of this method in collaborative navigation of multiple instruments and long-term physiological signal perception. (New Society)