A range of complex surgical operations necessary to treat stroke victims, confront hardened arteries or address blockages in the bloodstream are about to be made safer as researchers from the Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory at Australia’s Monash University put the final touches to the design of micro-motors small enough to be injected into the human bloodstream.
A research paper, published today, Tuesday, 20 January, in IOP Publishing’s Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering details how researchers are harnessing piezoelectricity, the energy force most commonly used to trigger-start a gas stove, to produce microbot motors just 250 micrometres, a quarter of a millimetre, wide.
Methods of minimally invasive surgery, such as keyhole surgery and a range of operations that utilise catheters, tubes inserted into body cavities to allow surgical manoeuvrability, are preferred by surgeons and patients because of the damage avoided when contrasted against cut and sew operations. Serious damage during minimally invasive surgery is however not always avoidable and surgeons are often limited by, for example, the width of a catheter tube which, in serious cases, can fatally puncture narrow arteries.
Remote controlled miniature robots small enough to swim up arteries could save lives by reaching parts of the body, like a stroke-damaged cranial artery, that catheters have previously been unable to reach (because of the labyrinthine structure of the brain that catheters are too immobile to safely reach). With the right sensor equipment attached to the microbot motor, the surgeon’s view of, for example, a patient’s troubled artery can be enhanced and the ability to work remotely also increases the surgeon’s dexterity.
Microbot motors fit to swim human arteries
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