Surgical Microbot Developed

An anonymous reader writes to mention a Wired article about the first surgical nanobot developed for practical use. No wider that two human hairs, the machine is intended to swim through arteries and the digestive tract, and can perform surgical procedures in spaces no bigger than 250 microns. The article also addresses safety concerns; the bot will swim upstream from blood flow, so if something goes wrong it can be retrieved on its way back. Likewise, for the most delicate procedures it can be fitted with a tether, to ensure it doesn't get lost. From the article: "The tiny robot, small enough to pass through the heart and other organs, will be inserted using a syringe. Guided by remote control, it will swim to a site within the body to perform a series of tasks, then return to the point of entry where it can be extracted, again by syringe. For example, the microrobot might deliver a payload of expandable glue to the site of a damaged cranial artery -- a procedure typically fraught with risk because posterior human brain arteries lay behind a complicated set of bends at the base of the skull beyond the reach of all but the most flexible catheters."

Comments

Re:great. . .

[TheMadcapZ]

The bad part of this robot is if the tether snaps, or loses power and ends up in the brain. Stroke and lawsuit city!!!!

Neuroendovascular surgery

[daigu]

For example, the microrobot might deliver a payload of expandable glue to the site of a damaged cranial artery -- a procedure typically fraught with risk because posterior human brain arteries lay behind a complicated set of bends at the base of the skull beyond the reach of all but the most flexible catheters.

Getting beyond the "bends at the base of the skull" through the arteries is a surgical field called Neuroendovascular Surgery that has been in development since the 1960s and is used on everyone from babies to the old to people with cocaine habits and so forth. If I had an illiness that required it, I'd take a surgeon who performs several hundred of these operations a year over a remote controlled robot.

Re:great. . .

[jdray]

I was wondering about that myself. Any ideas on how to guard against that?

Realistically, any sort of circulatory system surgery has the potential to knock loose a piece of plaque that can end up in your brain, and this beats the heck out of having a medical snake run up one of your arteries (a friend of mine had heart surgery; they went in through her thigh in a one-inch incision).

Also, on a tether, you could feed the thing power so it could do longer, more complex surgeries.