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If acute stroke can be treated within 90 minutes of the onset of the disease, the patient’s survival rate will increase significantly.

MIT Associate Professor Xuanhe Zhao said.

In traditional vascular interventions, surgeons require very rigorous training to thread a small guidewire into the patient’s aorta and manually control the action of the guidewire with the help of fluoroscopy. direction.

This surgery, on the one hand, the mental and physical strength of the surgeon is huge, the other side will alsoThe doctor in the operation is exposed to fluoroscopy radiation. More importantly, the difficulty of the operation is high. From the perspective of the proportion of patients and doctors, there are currently not enough doctors to operate.

Now, Xuanhe Zhao and the team designed a flexible robot, not only small It can pass through the blood vessels of the brain, and it also has the potential to reduce the difficulty of cerebral vascular occlusion surgery.

In traditional surgery, the outer layer of the catheter is covered with a layer of polymer. According to the team, such substances can cause friction, which may damage the inside of the blood vessel during operation. The MIT robotic outer layer uses a hydrogel that is mostly composed of water, enveloping 3D printed magnetic materials.

This hydrogel coating does not damage the inside of the blood vessel during movement and does not affect the magnetic properties of the material being wrapped.

The team created a silica gel replica of the real patient’s brain vascular model, filled with a red transparent liquid to test the robot’s efficiency in the blood vessels. The results show that robots with hydrogel coating move faster and smoother than robots without coating. This better tool can also reduce the difficulty of surgery.

In the hydrogel, it is a magnetic nickel-titanium alloy core, which allows the robot to control the forward direction without touching the doctor itself, but by magnetic means “space-by-space” operation. This special metal consists of a printing ink that is fused with tiny magnetic particles and is molded by 3D printing.

This structure is mainly controlled by a magnetic field, and it is like a hidden puppet teacher behind the line. In the demo video, we can see that the research team used the magnet “needle-through” to guide the robot through multiple rings.

One of the biggest challenges of this type of surgery is the inability to navigate through the complex cerebral blood vessels, which are very small and can’t be reached by commercially available catheters. And now this study shows the potential for us to break through this problem, even without surgery.

Kyujin Cho said, he is a professor of mechanical engineering at Seoul National University.

This “space-by-space” operation means that the future team has the potential to transform a blood vessel surgery that would otherwise have to be performed by a surgeon standing next to the patient to be a remotely operated procedure, avoiding perspective Radiation effects.

More importantly, the possibility of “air surgery” may mean that in the future, doctors can use the joystick to operate the surgery in another city, which can also solve the problem of doctors’ resource inequality. Currently, the robot is still not used for actual surgery.

The title image and the unlabeled source image are from MIT