ROBOT to diagnose LUNGS
What is this robot? and What can it do
What do lungs do?
Every cell in your body needs oxygen to live. Lungs allow oxygen in the air to be taken into the body, deliver oxygen to the cells in your body, and remove waste gases, including carbon dioxide, from the body when you exhale.
LUNGS can also
Allow you to talk and to smell.
Warms air to match your body temperature and moisturizes it to the humidity level, that your body needs.
Doctor Consultation
Laurie, who is in her early 30s, has been suffering from a persistent cough for the past few weeks. So, she decided to visit a pulmonologist to diagnose her problem.
The doctor has recommended Laurie undergo a chest X-ray and blood test
The doctor has found something unusual on her chest X-ray. So, Doctor has advised Laurie for Bronchoscopy.
BRONCHOSCOPY
Bronchoscopy is a procedure a doctor uses to look inside the lungs and air passages. It’s usually performed by a doctor who specializes in lung disorders (a pulmonologist).
During bronchoscopy, a thin flexible tube with a light and a lens or small video camera on the end tube (bronchoscope) is passed through your nose or mouth, down your throat, into your trachea (windpipe), and into the airways (bronchi and bronchioles) of your lungs.
BRONCHOSCOPY PROCEDURE and PROBLEMS
The diameter of the bronchoscope is around 4 millimeters and when the procedure is done, a thin tube (bronchoscope) is passed through the nose or mouth down through the throat, and into the lungs.
But, because of its width, it can only pass until the upper part of the lungs. To examine further inside, doctors need to insert the Catheter (pic-‘A’) through a bronchoscope(pic-‘C’). This Catheter would be around 2 millimeters in diameter and using this, doctors would examine the airway passages by moving the bronchoscope in the required direction.
But, inserting a catheter into the desired air passage is becoming difficult for doctors and sometimes they are even depending on the X-ray to do this procedure.
In rare cases, an airway may be injured during bronchoscopy. If the lung is punctured, air can collect in the space around the lung, which can cause the lung to collapse.
Magnetic Tentacle Robot
This robot is developed by Storm Lab in association with the Leeds center for cancer research.
The research team behind this innovation is
What is this robot?
The diameter of this robot would be around 2 millimeters, which is slightly more than a ball-point pen tip.
This robot can examine the airway passages of the lung in an effective way than to a traditional bronchoscope because of its lesser width.
In general, the airway passages of the lungs are narrow and they are having a tree-root structure. This robot can be helpful to examine this complicated structure.
DESIGN and WORKING
This robot is designed to overcome the problems faced with a traditional bronchoscope and the main challenges faced by researchers in the design of this robot is
To design it with a smaller diameter.
To make it more flexible to bend and turn it in any desired direction.
Because of these characteristics, the robot can easily pass through airway passages in the lungs. Instead of manual guidance, researchers have developed a programmed approach for this robot. So, it can guide itself using the program, while examining the lungs.
This robot is spanned 80 millimeters in length and had a diameter of millimeters The reason for the flexibility of this robot is that researchers have used Smooth Elastomeric material. This robot is also embedded with small magnetic chips.
WORKS with the help of ROBOTIC ARMS
The device would be guided into the lungs using a process that would be specifically designed for each treatment using magnets installed on robotic arms on the outside of the body.
The above video shows How controlling the motion of external magnets can change the shape of the magnetic tentacle robot, allowing it to move between a series of obstacles.
Pre-operative lung scans of a patient are used to plan and configure the robotic system’s path through the bronchial tree. The magnetic particles in the catheter segments are forced to change form or direction as per the movement of magnets on the robotic arms, which are on the outside of the patient, allowing the robot to be guided through the lungs and to the required location(possibly a suspicious lesion).
The robot is used to take a tissue sample or provide treatment once it has arrived at the desired place.
Uses
This robot can collect samples of cancer tissue inside the lungs.
It can also deliver anti-cancer drugs in difficult-to-reach places.
It can diagnose and treat any kind of problems related to the Lungs, right from Asthma to Lung Cancer.
Trails
Laboratory investigations using a 3D model of a bronchial tree created from anatomical data served as the foundation for the proof of concept. This proof of concept has been successful. But, the efficiency of the device in navigating lungs removed from a corpse will be examined in the next phase of the research.
To Conclude,
When a patient is infected with a particular type of cancer, doctors would examine the organ in the body, for which the tumor has been infected and they would mostly try to remove the infected organ from the body, if possible.
The prognosis of Lung cancer isn’t good and it isn’t a type of cancer that doctors would take risks to operate on. Not only cancer, but lung-related problems are also the ones, which are to be dealt with utmost care. I believe that this robot can help in treating such diseases and in effective diagnosis.
Hopefully, this robot should come into use soon, after passing all the rigorous tests and with all the approvals.
