Researchers at Vanderbilt University are working on a robot for performing surgeries in a quick and less invasive manner.
The machine would be used to perform operations on the brains of patients with epilepsy, according to CNET. This procedure requires the part of the patient's brain to be removed, stimulated, or disconnected, and for the patient to spend three months recovering.
These processes are often invasive and take a long time to complete, and mechanical engineering graduate student David Comber and mechanical engineering associate professor Eric Barth hope to make this type of surgery more convenient for both surgeons and patients. Their robot goes through the patient's cheek to get to the brain from underneath, carefully passing through gaps in the bone. This allows the robot to get to its target quicker and avoid drilling through the person's skull.
Such procedures are performed on the hippocampus, the area in the lower part of the brain that is affected by epileptic seizures, CNET reported.
The robot is able to perform this surgery with a shape-memory alloy needle made of nickel titanium. This needle must work along a curving path as well as from inside an MRI machine that provides a strong magnetic field needed for the procedure. Some of the needle's concentric tubes are curved so the tip can get through a curved path in the brain. The surgeon inserts the needle in small steps so he/she can use MRI scans to track its position along the way.
Comber and Barth said the needle has a greater accuracy than 1.8 millimeters.
The team worked with other researchers on their project, such as mechanical engineering associate professor Robert Webster, who created a system of surgical needles than can be steered, and neurological surgery associate professor Joseph Neimat, CNET reported.
Neimat said that while surgeons send needles through the cheek in other procedures, such as finding areas of epileptic seizure activity and implanting electrodes to monitor activity in the brain, needles used for epilepsy operations can't reach the hippocampus to perform surgery because they are straight. He added that curved needles will help make this procedure much less invasive.
"We could do a dramatic surgery with nothing more than a needle stick to the check," Neimat said.
The team now plans to test the robot on cadavers, and Barth believes the robot can be used in hospitals within the next ten years.
