Robotic Arm Developed for Endovascular Surgery, Can Treat Stroke Patients Remotely Via Joystick

MIT scholars recently developed a new robotic innovation that could assist neurosurgeons in treating patients with stroke. The instrument could be controlled from a medical facility even if the patient is in a different place.

MIT's Robotic Arm for Blood Clot Surgery

According to the experts, the new medical machine uses a robotic arm that can carry out surgical procedures even if the specialist is elsewhere through a joystick. Among the main functions of the invention is to remove blood clots from an individual safely.

Endovascular intervention is a common surgical operation usually done quickly upon diagnosis. This is because the problem can inflict damage to the brain organ. The procedure is led by a surgeon inserting a thin medical wire into the clot's location to remove the blockage. Other operations use drugs to break down blood clots.

Like other surgical operations, endovascular interventions require a patient and a specialist to carry out the procedure in a medical facility. This limiting factor poses a problem to the affected people and even the experts, as the access to treatment does not reach those who need it properly, especially those who live in remote places.

To answer this problem, experts from MIT created a simple solution that could allow an easy endovascular operation while saving time and effort for patients and their attending neurosurgeons.

Mechanical, civil, and environmental engineering expert Xuanhe Zhao, who also co-authored the study, explained in an MIT News report that their team conceptualized a surgical operation in which the patient could have easy access instead of the individual being transported from rural regions to a large city where the treatment is available.

Through the robotic arm, a neurosurgeon can view the patient's status in real-time while conducting the operation remotely, Zhao continued.

Remote Endovascular Surgery

Many robotic instruments have been developed to assist surgeries such as endovascular intervention. Most of these innovations use an arm that can go through nerves and internal organs precisely.

In other endovascular surgeries, according to Brain Tomorrow, robots commonly rely on a motor system that could retract the clot-injected wires while twisting the medium through a patient's body. Lead author Yoonho Kim explains that this process must be met with the same precision as a real surgeon, and developing the approach in a robotic arm is challenging.

What the team programmed into their robotic arm is based on a distinct mechanism that levels up the performance of a surgical machine, Kim added.

The team previously developed a method in which a handheld magnet navigates a surgical thread, allowing the piece to pass through a model of blood vessels in the brain. The latest research has attached the same magnet to the medical-grade machine. The arm can be maneuvered remotely from a different place through a mouse-like controller with a joystick.

Even though the procedure requires the thread to be as thin as possible, the controls are minimized because of the magnetic tip of the wire. This makes the solution easily go through any parts of the brain's internals by simply controlling the joystick. The study was published in Science Robotics, titled "Telerobotic neurovascular interventions with magnetic manipulation."

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