Swimming robots; that’s what they’re calling these tiny robots, powered by MRI magnetism, that are implanted in a child’s cerebrospinal fluid or the urinary tract, to provide targeted therapies like delivering stem cells or drugs to specific locations or to take biopsies in a much less traumatic and painful way.
They’re also being used to adjust prosthetic devices as the child grows, according to a story by Terry Sharrer at Medical Automation.
The same magnetism that generates MRI images might be used to guide “swimming robots” to provide a variety of health services to children. That’s the hope of Pierre Dupont, PhD chief of Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering at Children’s Hospital Boston.
According to Sharrer’s story, engineers at Children’s Hospital Boston have proven the ability to program the magnetic field generated by a clinical MRI scanner to “motorize and control a robotic instrument.”
“We’ve demonstrated that MRI, in addition to providing terrific images of soft tissue, can also produce sufficient force to drive a robotic device,” Dupont, a senior investigator at the hospital, said in Sharrer’s story. “Our ultimate goal is to create magnetically powered robots that can either travel through the body to perform highly targeted therapies or reside inside the body as adjustable prosthetic devices.”
Sharrer writes that Dupont envisions, in addition to the other tasks the robots can do, implantable devices that “could be adjusted to regulate blood flow in the heart, or gradually enlarged to prevent the need for new, larger implants as a child grows.”
Believe it or not, Dupont’s robotic biopsy device was built from LEGOS, and has a freely rotating arm that swings in the direction of the magnetic field. A series of gears then converts that motion into the draw of a biopsy needle strong enough to puncture tissue and then withdraw, Sharrer writes.
According to Chris Jablonski, this is not the first time a healthcare facility in Boston has thought about using swimming robots. In 2007 Jablonski that Nobuhiko Hata, designed a swimming robot used to explore the human gastrointestinal tract from esophagus to colon. , technical director of image guided therapy at Brigham And Women's Hospital and a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School
Other devices under development at the time, Jablonski reported, were designed to release chemicals into the body or direct a tiny laser at a health problem, “using oscillations in the magnetic field of an MRI machine to power its fins.” Hence, the word “swimming.”
Although MRI-compatible robots have been built, no one had previously created an MRI-powered motor, Dupont says, according to Sharrer. The team has also recently “demonstrated the ability to have the MRI machine’s magnetic field independently control two robots at once, and also created an MRI-driven locking mechanism for the motor,” according to Sharrer.
Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by
Stefanie Mosca
