Friday, March 9, 2007

Fantastic Robotic Voyage (cont.)

Filed under: GI , etc.

The Daily Mail has more details about the robotic device from Ritsumeikan University and the Shiga University of Medical Science in Japan, reported by us about ten days ago.

Doctors would be armed with MRI body scans of the patient taken in advance to help them navigate the robot.

However, unlike the plot of the 1966 Raquel Welch film Fantastic Voyage -- which featured a microscopic crew and submarine travelling through a scientist's bloodstream -- this device could not be inserted into blood vessels because it is too big.

But it could be placed within the digestive tract, where it could be used to seek out and treat cancers of the oesophagus or bowel. In tests on animals the robot, which weighs around five grams and is roughly the size of a cockroach, is said to have performed very well...

According to one of its developers, Professor Masaaki Makikawa, this new prototype robot has the ability to perform treatment inside the body, eliminating the need for surgery in some cases. Miniature robots able to move through the body would be particularly useful to investigate and treat tumours in hard-to-reach parts of the body, such as sections of the bowel...

Its legs had tiny hooks on the end so it could crawl through the gut without slipping. It also had a special clamp that allowed doctors to stop it altogether if they spotted something of concern and needed to take a closer look.

At the time, researcher Dr Ariana Menciassi, of the Sant' Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, said: "All the indications are that this will be far less uncomfortable than a colonoscopy or gastroscopy in which the intestine is inflated, causing much pain to the patient."

Oh, sure -- patients will be lining up to have this cockroach-sized bug crawling inside them. Face it, no matter how you "slice" it, invasive GI procedures will never be as palatable to the public as radiology...

Link to an article, featuring an explanatory diagram...

---

---

---

---