Eye Surgery By Magnetically Guided Microbots Moves Toward Clinical Trials 47
Sabine Hauert writes "According to robotics researcher Simone Schürle from ETH Zurich's Multi-Scale Robotics Lab (MSRL), the OctoMag is a magnetic manipulation system that uses electromagnetic coils to wirelessly guide micro-robots for ophthalmic surgery. With this system, mobility experiments were conducted in which a micro-robot with a diameter of 285 um (about four times the width of a hair) was navigated reliably through the eye of a rabbit, demonstrating the feasibility of using this technology in surgical applications."
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Not unnatural per se
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals [wikipedia.org]
Wet Macular Degeneration (Score:4, Interesting)
Dude! (Score:2)
Are we not all aware that the NSA is scanning all of our data now?
Stoked (Score:5, Interesting)
As I age, I'm getting this accumulation of little maladies that's making me really hanker for advances in surgical technologies. Case in point, I've got an annoying floater in my right eye. They're traditionally hard to treat effectively, I think partially because normal surgical techniques does as much harm as good for this problem. It seems like just the job for a micro-robot that can swim through an eye's vitreous and gather/destroy other small objects.
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The problem is cost; we now have a lot of new toys, but they're often expensive as hell, even in countries with NHSs, and the price of these procedures seems to have barely dropped compared to almost any other are of the tech field.
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Like you, I'm hoping that there will soon be available working remedies, ones better than what is now done, for some of the things beginning to plague my good eye. This potential tool looks promising.
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... Case in point, I've got an annoying floater in my right eye. ... It seems like just the job for a micro-robot that can swim through an eye's vitreous and gather/destroy other small objects.
Even better, the robot could upgrade you to the new Google-floater: Just relax and look at the ceiling and you're on the internet.
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Just try not to lie back and think of England.
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Hope you are rich, or have exploited your children well.
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The cure for floaters is a vitrectomy [wikipedia.org]. Believe me, you do NOT want that surgery! The surgery itself isn't bad but the recovery, which lasts from one to two weeks, is pure hell. The vitreous is removed from the eye and replaced with nitrogen gas, and you have to look at the floor until the eye replaces the gas with new vitreous. It's also incredibly dangerous to your eyesight until the vitreous returns and the gas goes away; you could go blind from a sudden change in air pressure. AFAIK a surgeon will only d
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Yep, as soon as I read "mobility experiments were conducted in which a microrobot with a diameter of 285 m (about four times the width of a hair) was navigated reliably through the eye of a rabbit", I thought of that movie.
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Did anyone else think of Innerspace (1987) [wikipedia.org]?
Reading a summary referring to eye surgery, Zurich and a researcher named Schürle, the first thing that flashed into my gulliver after me thoughts drifted into hearing the blissful heaven of Beethoven's Ninth was that I'd like to have her right down there on the floor with the old in-out, real savage.
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Agree with parent. Airplane is a must see movie. But as was pointed out, many of the jokes are likely to go unnoticed, or not understood by those who didn't live in or study the era.
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The possibilities... (Score:2)
Someday these will be completely automated. Insert in eye, it does a thorough inspection, figures out what's wrong, and fixes it.
Maybe these can also help attach severed nerves and arteries. With the help of someone (or a robot) to hold the pieces together, a syringe full of these could swarm the body of someone who's just been blown to bits and put him back together again before the brain runs out of oxygen.
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Looks great for zapping all kinds of anomalies too. Very cool directional technology. Wonder about side effects of em field exposure but not too much as its widely used for diagnostics (f/MRI).
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We might miss our flying cars and jetpacks, but only because we've realized there's far more amazing things to research than personal locomotion.
A fully automated robot doing research on Mars;
The possibility of near-limitless amounts of information and communication readily available on large swathes of our populated landmass;
Constructing any sort of object in any sort of shape with a single machine;
YHWH
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I know my grandfather was always amazed by what tech I used daily before he died a few years ago at 89yrs. Computers and cell phones were a mistery to him.
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42 years and my only disbelief is that we aren't advancing faster in the medical field right now (Not to disparage those working in the field) and that we aren't doing more in space. Many of these trends were already well established by the early 80s.
If you want an inflection point, you probably have to look at when the transistor hit mainstream and pick someone who had already had some life experience by then.
I remember they were doing an interview with a guy who was 100+ years old (this would have been ab
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42 years and my only disbelief is that we aren't advancing faster in the medical field right now
WTF?? Fifty years ago, cataracts meant going blind for all but a lucky few. Now cataracts mean you no longer need eyeglasses. Fifty years ago they anethstetized you with automotive starting fluid; highly flammable, and a very nasty experience for the patient. Going under was like dying and coming to meant vomiting. Now they say "ok, you're going to sleep now" and the next thing you know you're in the recovery roo
Re:The possibilities... (Score:4, Funny)
Someday these will be completely automated. Insert in eye, it does a thorough inspection, figures out what's wrong, and fixes it.
Please, don't limit your imagination like that. Inserting something in your eye is so barbaric.
Now imagine... someday these will be completely automated. Insert magnetically controlled robot in your ass....
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Well, there's a delicate corneal inversion procedure... a multi-opti-pupil-optomy. But, in order to keep from damaging the eye sockets, they've got to go in through the rectum.
Ocular Oncology (Score:4, Informative)
Two words you do not want to hear together when getting a referral from a retinal specialist.
I had a tumor inside my eye. Maybe this process could have saved the vision in my eye, as opposed to the invasive radiation treatment I had to deal with instead. The radiation has basically done a number on the vision in that eye, which has degraded quite a bit since my treatment almost 3 years ago.
Keep in mind, there are other issues... when they did the biopsy, it resulted in bleeding in my eye, a shocking discovery I made after the treatment (where a radioactive plaque was sewn to my eye, under the tumor, for a week) when I would put the drops prescribed in my eye. It was unexpected, basically a dark encroaching blob that floated into my vision when my head was tilted back. I suspect injecting these into an eye would result in a similar problem. IT took several weeks to clear up (blood absorption is slow in the eye). I'm also not sure if these are up to the task of killing a 6mm tumor.
The rest of the lab aren't sure... (Score:1)
I For One... (Score:1)
Is experimenting on Jewish priests legal? (Score:1)
With this system, mobility experiments were conducted in which a micro-robot with a diameter of 285 um (about four times the width of a hair) was navigated reliably through the eye of a rabbi ...