Robots crawl in bodies for surgery

Associated Press

PITTSBURGH

Imagine a tiny snake robot crawling through your body, helping a surgeon identify diseases and perform operations.

It’s not science fiction. Scientists and doctors are using the creeping, metallic tools to perform surgery on hearts, prostate cancer and other diseased organs. The snakebots carry tiny cameras, scissors and forceps, and even more advanced sensors are in the works. For now, they’re powered by tethers that humans control. But experts say the day is coming when some robots will roam the body on their own.

“It won’t be very long before we have robots that are nanobots, meaning they will actually be inside the body without tethers,” said Dr. Michael Argenziano, the chief of Adult Cardiac Surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

Argenziano was involved with some of the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration clinical trials on robotic heart surgery more than 10 years ago. Now he says snake robots have become a commonly used tool that gives surgeons a whole new perspective.

“It’s like the ability to have little hands inside the patients, as if the surgeon had been shrunken, and was working on the heart valve,” he said.

But Argenziano and experts in robotics say the new creations work best when they’re designed for very specific tasks. “The robot is a tool. It is no different in that sense than a scalpel. It’s really a master-slave device,” he said.

Howie Choset has been researching and building robots, particularly snake robots, at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University for years.

Choset believes that his snake robot and others like it help reduce medical costs by making complex surgeries faster and easier. Choset says his new design is smaller and more flexible than earlier models: The diameter of the head is less than the size of a dime.

The size of surgical robots allows surgeons to operate with far less damage to the body, helping the patient heal faster.