Brain clots meet their match with robot needle
It’s a popular desert made from gelatin, but for ViSE-affiliated scientists at Vanderbilt University, it’s also proving to be the ideal medium for testing a highly sophisticated robot, a steerable needle called the Active Cannula.
The needle is designed to navigate through the brain to reach and remove potentially fatal blood clots, leaving the surrounding tissue intact. Engineer Robert Webster says he was inspired to design the steerable needle, when his father developed a brain clot. “I was interested in that medical problem because of that and he was lucky, he was one of the ones that survived and didn’t have brain damage.”
But according to neurosurgeon Kyle Weaver many people aren’t so lucky. Diseases like hypertension and diabetes that are associated with blood clots, are on the rise and Weaver says that currently 1 in 50 people will develop a clot in their lifetime and of those, 40 percent will either die or develop brain damage. And once a blood clot forms in the brain, Weaver says there is very little a surgeon can do to remove it: “Often times based on the anatomy and the way the blood vessels are configured and these disease processes, they are often times deep down in the brain. And the thought is that getting those is that the surgery is actually going to do more damage than the blood clot is on its own.”
That’s where the needle robot comes in. It comprises a series of curved flexible metal tubes controlled by a computer. Webster says that neurosurgeons will be able to scan a patient’s brain and the computer will then map the most efficient route to the clot while using its flexible tubes to navigate around delicate brain matter.
Watch the full story here: Robot Needle