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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."
I for one welcome our surgical microbot overlords.
Isn't this too big to be a nanobot?
Anywho, i wonder if they'll hook this sucker up to a joystick for real time control, anyone played ballistics? Like that only instead of breaking the speed of sound, you try not to cripple someone for life, for real!!!
I give it 2 thumbs up... 2 thumbs... well, one thumb and a hand twich...
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
use Jokes::Std::Beowulf;
use Jokes::Std::Overlords::Robotic;
Do you have ESP?
The article:
The Slashdot headline:
Nanomachines have already been used to perform surgery. For example, Dr. Victor Niguel developed them to attack the Pempti strain in 2018.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The theory behind the microrobot's propulsion system is modeled after turbine and helicopter blades, Friend said.
"In and of itself, the idea is not especially new, but it has always fallen down around the propulsion system," he said. So, at the end of the day, what we have is another step towards a working microbot, not the finished product.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
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.
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.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Ya, possibly, but there's no more risk than having your body cut open and worked on by people. Surgery is surgery. :)
I don't reply to Anonymous posts; if you have something to say to me, identify yourself or I won't reply.
I do have medical training, so let me explain:
The blood-brain barrier has to do with the tighter junctions between the cells that form blood vessel walls, which prevents diffusion of most larger molecules into the brain, and prevents migration of cells into the brain. This is how the brain becomes an immunologically-priviledged site.
The blood-brain barrier does not affect the LUMEN of the blood vessels - only their LINING. Thus, it does not have any role in filtering particles within the bloodstream itself. So it cannot prevent an object from being stuck in a small artery or arteriole, obstructing blood flow and causing a stroke.