Today’s ophthalmic surgeons continue to rely on on bulky, manually operated tools that can be quite invasive while being limited as to what can be done with them. Lasers offer precision, but they’re not applicable in many situations because of the potential of damage to the eye.
A research team at the Swiss science and technology institute ETH Zurich has been working on a system that can control a micro-probe injected into the eye using an array of electromagnets. The OctoMag or OphthoMag system can move the probe, that’s only a bit thicker than human hair, with five degrees of freedom while visualizing its position under a microscope. The team also created a smaller version of the system, the MiniMag, for laboratory work at an even smaller scale.
Here’s a video describing the technology and the following demonstrating the system on a model eye:
Here’s a tiny magnetic probe being steered inside a model eye:
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