The Robotic “Snake” Will Reduce the Need for Open Surgery

The inventors of CardioARM are Dr Alon Wolf, now based at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, and his US colleague Dr Howie Choset of Carnegie Mellon University in the US.

“Both Howie and myself are experts in snake robotics,” says Wolf. “We are working with robotic snakes for search and rescue operations. So we started thinking if we can send snakes to crawl inside buildings to look for survivors, then why can’t we send the same snake inside our body to fix it?”

Choset and Wolf designed a robotic snake that is sufficiently small, strong and flexible to fit inside the human body. They partnered with Italian surgeon Professor Mark Zenati, now at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and formed Cardiorobotics and their first snake-based device, the CardioARM.

“It cuts down the need for any ‘open’ surgery,” Wolf told ISRAEL21c. “More and more surgery done today is done in minimally invasive ways. Tools in operation rooms are not flexible. The CardioARM is flexible enough for remote and hard to reach anatomies. The heart is a good example … now we don’t have to cut open the person.”

The device has been used to treat the hearts of pigs and clinical trials on humans are expected to start in 2009. It will allow open-heart surgery to be performed with a small incision and thereby reduce recovery time and risk of hospital-related infections and complications from surgery; in the US alone, there are reportedly more than one million cardiac procedures performed annually. In addition, it could be applied in the areas of laparoscopy, colonoscopy and arthroscopy.

“We are working to just have a single port in the body and from that point being able to reach any location,” said Zenati in his interview with ISRAEL21c. “There is no technology that allows one to do that.” Other surgical assistants on the market have severe limitations says the company. One called the da Vinci system needs five or six entry points and cannot squeeze through tight locations.

CardioArm is controlled by a joystick and gives 103 degrees of freedom and can wrap around organs like the heart until it finds the problematic tissue. The central element of the technology is a tele-operated probe, which is highly flexible, either assuming the shape of its surroundings or being reshaped according to the surgeon’s needs.

As it moves through the body, it is programmed to “remember” where it was in space and time, to avoid harming delicate tissues as it retracts from any point. A working channel inside the body of the “snake” allows surgeons to pass tools to deep regions inside the body, behind organs to reach places that are otherwise impossible to access without a scalpel and saw.

A modification of the robotic arm can make the device applicable in abdominal surgery and the mouth. The company hopes to one day design the device so that it can be inserted through one location and have several arms so that each arm can operate in unison on a different part of the body.

“In the future, 100 percent of the surgeries will be done in a noninvasive way,” says Wolf. “Who knows when, maybe 100 or 200 years from now. Our device is one of the steps toward this and will allow surgeons to do the things they cannot do today.”

Source: ISRAEL21c.org