Robot slithers through the small intestine: MIT video shows soft robotic endoscope
MIT engineers have built a soft robotic endoscope that moves through the hard-to-reach small intestine, takes tissue samples and sprays drugs. So far it has only been tested in animals.
Photo: InSapphoWeTrust from Los Angeles, California, USA / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped and resized)
Video: YouTube · Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) · youtube.com
The small intestine is more than six metres long and only about two and a half centimetres wide, which makes it hard to reach with conventional endoscopes. A team led by Giovanni Traverso, professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, has developed a soft, tube-shaped robot for the job. The work was published in the journal Science Robotics (DOI 10.1126/scirobotics.adt2230), and MIT presented it with a video on 28 October.
Its movement is modelled on snakes: each actuator has four air chambers that can be inflated in different combinations to extend the tube or bend it in any direction. Balloons at the head and tail inflate in turn to push the robot forward. Kirigami-patterned sleeves – a cutting technique borrowed from paper craft – lie flat until a balloon stretches them; then tiny needles pop out and grip the intestinal lining. The robot carries a camera, a drug sprayer and clips for taking biopsies or removing polyps.
In animal studies the robot travelled about two metres through the small intestine, according to MIT, demonstrating the camera, sprayer and clips. It has not yet been tested in humans. "By tuning the amount of air that goes into these chambers, you can tune the direction that the robot is moving in," Traverso says. Next, the team wants to improve navigation and test further applications in the small intestine.