This Robotic Worm Can Be Guided Through The Human Brain

MIT robotics engineers have created a robot worm which they can magnetically steer to skillfully navigate through winding and extremely narrow arterial pathways in the human brain. It can one day serve in clearing blockages as well as clots contributing to aneurysms and strokes. Meanwhile, it could also be the next big leap in robotic evolution.

While strokes are the biggest cause of disability and death in the US, but we can increase patients’ survival rates significantly by relieving blockages in blood vessels within the first 1.5 hours of treatment. However, this process is complicated that requires skilled surgeons to guide a thin wire manually through the arteries in a patient up into a damaged vessel in the brain, then a catheter could deliver treatments or retrieve a clot.

It’s not just that these wires can damage vessels linings when they travel through the patient’s body, but surgeons are also exposed to a high level of radiation generated from a fluoroscope guiding them by producing real-time X-ray images. There’s still a long way to go.

The engineers at MIT, with their expertise in using magnets for manipulating simple machines and in water-based biocompatible hydrogels, developed a robotic worm which houses a pliable titanium-nickel alloy core featuring memory shape characteristics so it will return to the original shape when it’s bent. The engineers coated the core in a paste of rubber embedded with magnetic particles and then wrapped those particles in a layer of hydrogels which lets the robotic worm glide through blood vessels and arteries without causing any damage.

The team tested the robot on a small course of obstacles with several small rings forming a twisting path, the team guided the robot with a strong magnet that could work at a distance long enough for placing outside the patient. Plus, the engineers mocked up a replica at life-size of the blood vessels in the brain, they found that the robot could not only navigate through the obstacle easily but it may also be upgraded with additional tools such as a mechanism to deliver clot reducing drugs. Moreover, they succeeded in replacing the metal core of the robotic worm with an optical cable, which means when it got to the destination, it could deliver laser pulses to remove a blockage.

The robot would speed up the procedure after strokes, decrease radiation exposure on surgeons. Additionally, although the worm was tested with manual operation of the magnet, eventually, there will be machines to control the magnet with higher accuracy, hence improve and speed up the robot’s journey through the patient’s body.