[tt] "Snake" to do surgery

[Donald P Martin]

A Robotic Snake To Fix Broken Hearts And Organs

Main Category: Heart Disease

Also Included In: Cardiovascular / Cardiology;  Medical Devices /
Diagnostics

Article Date: 26 Jan 2009 - 5:00 PST

 

A snake is probably the last thing you'd ever want crawling around your
heart. But in the case of a new American-Israeli invention called the
CardioARM, this medical "snake" device may one day save your life. 

 

The new Israeli-American invention came by way of some brainstorming between
Israel's Dr. Alon Wolf and his American colleague Prof. Howie Choset, when
Wolf was working as a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. 

 

"Both Howie and myself are experts in snake robotics," says Wolf, who is now
based at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. "We are
working with robotic snakes for search and rescue operations. So we started
in the back of our minds thinking: if we can send snakes to crawl inside
buildings to look for survivors, then why can't we send the same snake
inside our body to fix it?" 

 

A few weeks later, Choset and Wolf had a eureka moment, and found a way to
design a robotic snake small enough, strong enough and flexible enough to
fit inside the human body. They partnered with the world-renowned Italian
surgeon Prof. Marco Zenati, now at the University of Pittsburgh School of
Medicine, and formed Cardiorobotics and their first snake-based device, the
CardioARM. 

 

A minimally invasive bypass 

 

"It cuts down the need for any 'open' surgery," Wolf tells ISRAEL21c. "More
and more surgery done today is done in minimally invasive ways. Tools in
operation rooms are not flexible. The CardioARM is flexible enough for
remote and hard to reach anatomies. The heart is a good example... now we
don't have to cut open the person." 

 

The CardioARM has been used to treat the hearts of pigs, and clinical trials
on human patients are expected to start this year. While robotic devices
that enable specialists to perform heart operations in a minimally invasive
way, do exist, the technology has not been refined enough to let more than
the expert perform with it. 

 

What the new CardioARM does is open up a whole new world, a field where
open-heart surgeries can be done with a small incision; where recovery time
will be reduced, and hospital-related infections and complications due to
surgery drastically cut down. 

 

Most of all though, Wolf suspects, it will allow specialists to perform more
complex medical procedures. "There are specialists and there are surgeons.
In between specialists and surgeons there is a twilight zone -- we are
trying to bridge this zone," he says. 

 

In the United States alone, there are over one million cardiac procedures
performed annually which could benefit from the CardioARM. But it will take
some years before the robotic snake makes an appearance at a hospital near
you. 

 

New medical devices take time until they pass through regulatory bodies in
America. Conservatively speaking, it will take a few years until this new
CardioARM is widely used, says Wolf, but it paves the wave for the day when
doctors will never have to cut open the body during surgery. 

 

Snaking through the body like nothing else 

 

Other surgical assistants in the market have severe limitations says the
company. One called the da Vinci system needs five or six entry points, and
cannot squeeze through tight locations. 

 

"We are working to just have a single port in the body and from that point
being able to reach any location," said Zenati in an interview. "There is no
technology that allows one to do that. The only one is the CardioARM." 

 

Besides bypass surgeries on the heart, the CardioARM or a modification of
it, could be applied in the areas of laparoscopy, colonoscopy, and
arthroscopy, say developers. Like playing a video game, the CardioArm is
controlled by a joystick and gives 103 degrees of freedom, and can wrap
around organs like the heart until it finds the problematic tissue. 

 

The central element of the CardioARM technology is a tele-operated probe,
which is highly flexible, either assuming the shape of its surroundings, or
reshaped according to the surgeon's needs. 

 

As it moves through the body, it is programmed to "remember" where it was in
space and time, to avoid harming delicate tissues as it retracts from any
point. A working channel inside the body of the "snake" allows surgeons to
pass tools to deep regions inside the body, behind organs to reach places
that were otherwise impossible to access without a scalpel and saw. 

 

Based in the United States, the snake-like probe is now being commercialized
by Cardiorobotics, which was co-founded by Wolf, Choset and Zenati. The
company was founded in 2005, and about seven people work for it. Grants from
the National Institute of Health, as well as the Pittsburgh Life Science
Greenhouse, have funded the early development stage of the device. 

 

No scalpels in our future? 

 

A modification of the robotic arm can make the device applicable in
abdominal surgery, as well as in the mouth. The company hopes to one day
allow the CardioARM to be inserted through one location, with several arms
like tentacles, so each arm could operate in unison on a different part of
the body. 

 

"In the future 100 percent of the surgeries will be done in a non-invasive
way," says Wolf. "Who knows when, maybe 100 or 200 years from now. Our
device is one of the steps toward this and will allow surgeons to do the
things they cannot do today." 

 

Written By Karin Kloosterman

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/136677.php

 

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