Microrobots for medical operations in narrow cavities

On the afternoon of January 17, 2024, an academic seminar on the theme of "Micro-controllers for medical operations in narrow cavities" was held in Siyuan Hall. This academic seminar was given by Professor Lu Haojian, a researcher of the Hundred Talents Program of the School of Control Science and Technology of Zhejiang University, a doctoral supervisor, an adjunct professor of the Affiliated Stomatological Hospital of the School of Medicine of Zhejiang University, and a member of the National High-level Young Talent Program. Masters and doctoral students of the Institute and some teachers participated in the event.

Microrobots for medical operations in narrow cavities

With the development of technology, medical surgical robots have now entered real life. When the robot needs to enter the body for interventional treatment, micro-robots for narrow cavity medical operations can solve the problems of early diagnosis and precise treatment of major diseases from three aspects: in-depth diagnosis and treatment of multi-level narrow cavities, safe interactive diagnosis and treatment of sensory control integration, and intelligent diagnosis and treatment assisted by artificial intelligence. However, at the same time, new materials and new designs need to be developed to meet the needs of in vivo biomedical applications. It is proposed that researchers at this stage need to use physical, biological or chemical methods to drive a micro-robot for drug delivery, surgery, sensing or interpretation.

In this academic report, Professor Lu introduced in detail two micro medical robots that have been successfully tested and put into practical medical applications. The first one is a micro medical robot for targeted drug delivery through the digestive tract. The robot's biological inspiration comes from dexterous and stable leg-footed animals. By investigating a large number of multi-legged animals, it was finally determined that the robot's leg length and leg spacing ratio is mainly between 2:1. This micro robot not only has low surface tension in a humid environment, but also has low friction on various substrates. Based on this, it can finally achieve movement under high humidity and high load. In an environment full of gullies and humidity, it can still achieve targeted delivery of drug loads. The robot can also be loaded with various types to achieve additional functions such as ambient temperature detection. In terms of the expanded application of robots, the conical legs (microneedles) can deliver drugs with low invasiveness, achieving a two-way combination of treating the symptoms and the root cause.

Professor Lu also introduced the micro-continuum robot for transtracheal diagnosis and treatment, and proposed a design method for a miniaturized continuum robot that combines magnetic drive and tendon drive. This method not only achieves a terminal outer diameter of ≤0.2mm (venous blood vessels ~3mm, terminal bronchial diameter ~0.6mm), but also achieves a drive angle of ≥180° and a dynamic tracking error of ≤10um. In addition, the robot also proposed a learning-based micro-continuum robot organization safe interactive operation control technology, so as to ultimately achieve preoperative intelligent judgment and intraoperative intelligent and safe operation through human-machine collaboration. Finally, a human-machine shared control technology based on intention imitation learning was proposed to achieve intelligent decision-making for cavity diagnosis and treatment of living animals. Professor Lu finally proposed that the future trend of small soft robots for biomedical applications should be to be as small as possible, so as to serve the medical field more accurately and effectively.

After the meeting, Professor Lu also had a Q&A session with the participants on the future development of sensors, and expressed his hope to conduct project cooperation exchanges with the Institute to jointly explore new research topics in the field of artificial intelligence.

Lu Haojian is a researcher of the Hundred Talents Program of the School of Control Science, Zhejiang University, a doctoral supervisor, and an adjunct professor of the Affiliated Stomatological Hospital of the School of Medicine, Zhejiang University. He was selected into the National High-level Young Talent Program. He received a bachelor's degree in engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology in 2015 and a doctorate from City University of Hong Kong in 2019. His main research directions include medical robots, micro-flexible sensors, and micro-nano manipulation. He has published more than 80 academic papers in important international journals and conferences such as Nature Communaons, vanced Science, and IEEE Transactions on Robotics. He serves as the associate editor of the 2022 and 2023 IEEE-ICRA conferences, the associate editor of the 2023 IEEE/JI conference, the associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering journal, the editor of the Cyborg and Bionic Systems journal (a Science cooperative journal), and the young editor of the Med-X journal (a Springer Nature publishing platform journal).

Reviewing Editor: Huang Fei