Robotic arm to conduct brain surgery

Robotic arm to conduct brain surgery
April 18, 2007Courtesy University of Calgaryand World Science staff

A ro­bot to be in­stalled at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­ga­ry in Can­a­da is to con­duct brain surg­eries in tan­dem with real-time brain scans cap­tured by Mag­net­ic Res­o­nance Im­ag­ing.The ro­bot, dubbed Neu­ro­Arm, “aims to rev­o­lu­tion­ize neu­ro­sur­gery,” the uni­ver­sity said in a state­ment.

Billed as the first sur­gi­cal ro­bot com­pat­ible with the ad­vanced imaging tech­nol­o­gy, it’s the cre­a­tion of neu­ro­sur­geon Gar­nette Suth­er­land of the uni­ver­si­ty. He spent six years lead­ing a team of Ca­na­di­an sci­en­tists to de­sign it. “Many of our mi­cro­sur­gi­cal tech­niques evolved in the 1960s, and have pushed sur­geons to the lim­its of their pre­ci­sion, ac­cu­ra­cy, dex­ter­i­ty and stami­na,” said Suth­er­land. “Neu­ro­Arm dra­ma­t­i­cal­ly en­hances the spa­tial res­o­lu­tion at which sur­geons op­er­ate, and shifts sur­gery from the or­gan to­wards the cell lev­el.”“The best sur­geons in the world can work with­in an eighth of an inch. Neu­ro­Arm makes it pos­si­ble for sur­geons to work ac­cu­rate­ly with­in the width of a hair,” said Doc Sea­man, a Cal­ga­ry phi­lan­thro­pist who do­nat­ed to the proj­ect along with two broth­ers. De­signed to be con­trolled by a sur­geon from a com­put­er work­sta­tion, neu­ro­Arm gives sur­geons un­prec­e­dent­ed con­trol, en­a­bling them to ma­ni­pu­late tools at a mi­cro­scop­ic scale, re­search­ers said. Sur­gi­cal test­ing is cur­rent­ly un­der­way. The first pa­tient is an­ti­ci­pated for this sum­mer at Cal­ga­ry’s Foothills Hos­pi­tal, site of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­ga­ry med­i­cal school’s re­search fa­cil­i­ty.De­vel­op­ing neu­ro­Arm re­quired an in­ter­na­tion­al col­labo­ra­tion of health pro­fes­sion­als, phys­i­cists, elec­tri­cal, soft­ware, op­ti­cal and me­chan­i­cal en­gi­neers to build a ro­bot that could work safe­ly in a sur­gi­cal suite and with­in the strong mag­net­ic field of the Mag­net­ic Res­o­nance ma­chine, ex­perts said.Suth­er­land’s team is de­vel­op­ing pro­grams with the uni­ver­si­ty and the Cal­ga­ry Health Re­gion, one of Can­a­da’s larg­est health sys­tems, to train sur­geons to use neu­ro­Arm. Many oth­er sur­gi­cal dis­ci­plines have and con­tin­ue to par­ti­ci­pate in ap­ply­ing neu­roArm to var­i­ous types of sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dures, the re­search­ers said.“We’re not just build­ing a ro­bot, we’re build­ing a med­i­cal ro­botics pro­gram,” Suth­er­land said. “We want the neu­ro­Arm tech­nol­o­gy to be trans­lated in­to the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty, i.e. hos­pi­tals around the world.”

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/070418_neuroarm.htm