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Inside an MRI, a Non-Metallic Robot Performs Prostate Surgery

posted by CoolHand on Friday July 10 2015, @02:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the robot-parade dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

One of the holy grails of robotic surgery is the ability to perform minimally invasive procedures guided by real-time scans from a magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, machine. The problem is the space inside MRI scanners is tight for a person, let alone a person and a robot. What's more, these machines use very strong magnetic fields, so metal is not a good thing to place inside of them, a restriction that is certainly a problem for robots.

Now researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) are developing a MRI-compatible robotic surgery tool that can overcome those limitations. Their system isn't made of metal, but instead has plastic parts and ceramic piezoelectric motors that allow it to work safely inside an MRI.

That area is uncomfortably near other important organs. Let's hope the scale on the monitor is 1:1...

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 10 2015, @04:28PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday July 10 2015, @04:28PM (#207522) Journal

    Do we really need real time scans for a robot to pull out a bullet?

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 11 2015, @01:00AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 11 2015, @01:00AM (#207719) Journal

    In most cases - no, we don't. But, the whole point of the article is, the robot is precise. It stabs those needles precisely where they need to be, first time, every time. The side benefit of that is, the time element. Robot gets the bullet without any guesswork - in fact, it gets all the fragments without any exploratory surgery involved. Doc doesn't have to search anymore, he can see every fragment before he even starts treating the victim. The robot doesn't even have to guess at which way to reach into the victim to avoid damaging the nearby artery, as the human surgeon has to do. In fact, with real time imaging, the robot can know which way to turn the fragment, so that the sharp edges of the fragment don't cause more damage as it is extracted.

    So, the robot with real time scanning works faster, more efficiently, and causes less peripheral damage while performing the necessary tasks. You tell me - do we need it?