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Eye Surgery By Magnetically Guided Microbots Moves Toward Clinical Trials
Sabine Hauert writes "According to robotics researcher Simone Schürle from ETH Zurich's Multi-Scale Robotics Lab (MSRL), the OctoMag is a magnetic manipulation system that uses electromagnetic coils to wirelessly guide micro-robots for ophthalmic surgery. With this system, mobility experiments were conducted in which a micro-robot with a diameter of 285 um (about four times the width of a hair) was navigated reliably through the eye of a rabbit, demonstrating the feasibility of using this technology in surgical applications."
I wonder if these could stop blood vessels under the retina from seeping without destroying the retina. I never knew WMD was as common as it is until I got it. The treatment is an injection in the eye every 6 weeks at $2500 each time. Good insurance pays off.
As I age, I'm getting this accumulation of little maladies that's making me really hanker for advances in surgical technologies. Case in point, I've got an annoying floater in my right eye. They're traditionally hard to treat effectively, I think partially because normal surgical techniques does as much harm as good for this problem. It seems like just the job for a micro-robot that can swim through an eye's vitreous and gather/destroy other small objects.
Two words you do not want to hear together when getting a referral from a retinal specialist.
I had a tumor inside my eye. Maybe this process could have saved the vision in my eye, as opposed to the invasive radiation treatment I had to deal with instead. The radiation has basically done a number on the vision in that eye, which has degraded quite a bit since my treatment almost 3 years ago.
Keep in mind, there are other issues... when they did the biopsy, it resulted in bleeding in my eye, a shocking discovery I made after the treatment (where a radioactive plaque was sewn to my eye, under the tumor, for a week) when I would put the drops prescribed in my eye. It was unexpected, basically a dark encroaching blob that floated into my vision when my head was tilted back. I suspect injecting these into an eye would result in a similar problem. IT took several weeks to clear up (blood absorption is slow in the eye). I'm also not sure if these are up to the task of killing a 6mm tumor.
Did anyone else think of Innerspace (1987)?
Reading a summary referring to eye surgery, Zurich and a researcher named Schürle, the first thing that flashed into my gulliver after me thoughts drifted into hearing the blissful heaven of Beethoven's Ninth was that I'd like to have her right down there on the floor with the old in-out, real savage.
Someday these will be completely automated. Insert in eye, it does a thorough inspection, figures out what's wrong, and fixes it.
Please, don't limit your imagination like that. Inserting something in your eye is so barbaric.
Now imagine... someday these will be completely automated. Insert magnetically controlled robot in your ass....