Mark Megahan
There remains a lot of room for improvement but a micro-miniaturized robot surgeon can crawl around just about anywhere inside the human body. It’s still in the development and testing stage and already outperforms standard equipment. There’s been a flurry of “science fiction becomes science fact” stories out there lately and this is one of them.
Robot laser surgery
The robot team didn’t need to do anything drastic, like shrink a surgical crew and their submarine, to zap out hard to reach lung tumors with a laser. Professor Pietro Valdastri “developed fully functional miniature robots that can go deep inside the human body to perform ultra-precise laser surgery.”
They’re not autonomous AI and fully under control of human surgeons. The ones who have had a chance to play with the system can’t help joking how similar this medical innovation is to “on-screen portrayals from science fiction.”
These robots aren’t humanoid at all. They’re “tiny worm-like” tentacles, positioned and operated by magnetic fields. For one of their demonstrations, the developers at STORM sent their tiny robot surgeon “deeper inside a [simulated] human cadaver’s lungs than is possible with current state-of-the-art surgical instruments.”
One researcher notes “that there are a number of organs and systems the incredible ‘micro-bots‘ can get inside to perform similar pinpoint explorations and surgeries.”
The robot itself is nothing more complicated than medical grade silicone, which is a “biocompatible plastic.” That means the “human body doesn’t have a negative reaction to the otherwise foreign objects operating inside of the body.”
The tricky and heavily patented part is the “precision placement of the embedded magnet particles that allow the two wormlike robots to maneuver independently.”
Breakthrough in design
The biggest problem Valdastri and his colleagues had to overcome was one anyone whoever played with fridge magnets is familiar with. “Normally, two magnets placed closely together would attract each other, creating a challenge for the researchers.”
They overcame it “by designing the bodies of the tentacles in a way that they can bend only in specific directions and by relocating the north and south poles in each magnetic robot tentacle.”
All the power comes from “a pair of magnetic devices operating outside the human body.” They “generate fields strong enough to cause the robots to maneuver deeper inside the lungs than even the most advanced equipment.”
By having a pair of them functioning independently, “one of the robots can carry a camera to assist surgeons, while the second robot can guide a surgical laser with extreme precision.” By “extreme precision” they mean push the barrel solidly up against the target’s forehead and blast.
The first thing surgeons gasp at is “how a robot that is only 2 millimeters in diameter can carry a laser.” That’s because it only needs to haul around a fiber optic cable. The laser sits on a table off to the side.
“The source of laser is external, but the laser light is sent to the tip of the magnetic tentacle via an optical fiber. So laser energy is delivered at the tip of the tentacle directly on the target.“
