As we develop a wide array of new implantable, injectable, and swallowable medical devices, the need to accurately track their location within the body becomes ever more critical. Currently, ultrasound, electromagnetism, and other methods are employed to track objects introduced into the body, but these modalities suffer from a number of imperfections that limit their accuracy, usefulness, and applicability. Now a team at Caltech have come up with a radically new way of localizing small devices introduced into the body with an impressive level of accuracy.
ATOMS, the acronym for the technique that stands for “addressable transmitters operated as magnetic spins,” involves tiny (1.4 square millimeters) silicon chips that include a magnetic field sensor, resonator, radio, and antenna. The devices are able to detect the strength and direction of a magnetic field produced by a magnet located nearby. In response to the measured parameters of the magnetic field, the devices resonate and produce a radio signal at different frequencies depending on where within the field they are. Once the resonance is detected, its frequency is then essentially used as the address of where the device is in the body.
The technology was already tested on laboratory mice with great success, hopefully paving the way for medical devices to gain this capability in the not too distant future.
Study in Nature Biomedical Engineering: Localization of microscale devices in vivo using addressable transmitters operated as magnetic spins…
Via: Caltech…