For minimally invasive surgery, the instruments used must be small. ETH Zurich researchers have now developed a method to transport large devices through a narrow catheter. This expands the possibilities for designing minimally invasive surgical tools.
A camel cannot go through the eye of a needle. But researchers at ETH Zurich have now achieved something that – figuratively speaking – comes quite close. They have developed a new approach to minimally invasive surgical instruments, thanks to which large objects can be brought into the body through a narrow catheter.
This works as follows: The researchers disassemble such devices into individual parts and then slide them through the catheter in a row, like a string of pearls. At the end of the catheter, the parts assemble themselves into a predefined shape thanks to built-in magnets.
In its research, the team – led by ETH doctoral student Hongri Gu, now a postdoc at the University of Konstanz – was primarily concerned with demonstrating the many possibilities of this new approach. Using 3D printing, the scientists also constructed an endoscopic grasper in a relatively simple way. Moreover, they showed that the new approach makes assembling an endoscope head consisting of three parts possible.
For their prototypes, the researchers combined soft, elastic segments with rigid segments, into which the tiny magnets are incorporated. This design method also allows an endoscope head to perform movements with very tight radii and angles that aren’t feasible with today’s endoscopes. This increased mobility broadens the possibilities when designing devices for minimally invasive surgery on organs such as the intestine or the stomach. The scientists published their demonstration study on the journal external pageNature Communications.
Source: ETH Zurich
