The New Frontier of Medical Robots
Released on 02/18/2014
The use of robots in medical care is really gonna open up
a whole caste of diagnostics and therapies
that otherwise were not accessible.
What I wanna do is create intelligent tools
that would allow a person with less medical training
perform the kind of repairs and diagnostics
that surgeons in the past otherwise had to do.
My research group does a lot of work on snake robots.
These are highly-articulated mechanisms
that can thread through tightly-packed volumes
and get to locationss that people
and machinery otherwise can't access.
So what we wanna think about is
how can we apply these robots to surgery?
One day I just said to myself, I'm gonna figure out
how to build a small, surgical snake robot
and 20 minutes, the idea came to me.
I figured out to manipulate cables so all the motors
can be as big as you want offboard
and by marionnating these cables,
we can steer this snake robot wherever we go.
It's rigid in that it can hold its shape
but it's flexible in that it can go in and around
organs without disturbing surrounding tissue areas.
Right now, if we need to have something repaired,
we undergo open surgery, and that's
very invasive, very risky, painful, costly.
The idea is, instead of having a large incision made,
a couple of small incisions are made
that you can enter it and then drive around your body
in a minimally invasive way without disturbing
the surrounding tissue, and get to the target
where you can deliver your therapy or perform a diagnostic.
The implication of this is that you no longer need
to be in a hospital, we can now perform
some of these procedures as office visits.
We've had three successful human cases.
We operated on a person who otherwise would have required
months of recovery, two weeks of hospital stay.
Instead, she went home the next day, no complications.
There are many next steps for this project.
Conceiving new ideas, overcoming technological challenges,
these are all frustrating, how to make the robot smaller,
that's a frustration that I sleep with almost every night.
But it's because of those frustrations,
it's because of those needs, we advance the technology.
(inspiring music)
Starring: Howard Choset
Safety and the Self-Driving Car
Hierarchical Design
Milk Refrigeration Systems for India's Off-Grid Communities
Engineering Sustainable Biofuels
Online Education: Expanding and Personalizing Access
Global Sustainability & Planetary Boundaries
The New Frontier of Medical Robots
Using Smart phoness to Farm Better
Preparation & Recovery for Catastrophes
Creating a Digital Ecology That Works
Unlocking Brain Data
Breakthroughs in Nanomedicine
Curing Unhappiness
Persuasive Gaming
Optogenetics and Enhancing Brain Functions