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Biotech Medicine

This Snakelike Robot Slithers Down Your Lungs and Could Spot Cancer (msn.com) 28

Posted by EditorDavid from the what-the-doctor-ordered dept.
"Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach," reports the Washington Post.

The tool "could improve the detection and treatment of lung cancer and other pulmonary diseases." In a medical paper released in the journal of Soft Robotics last week, scientists from the University of Leeds unveiled a new "magnetic tentacle robot," which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters thick — about double the size of a ballpoint pen tip — and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long.

In the future, the robot's use could be expanded to help doctors better, and more thoroughly, investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas, they said....

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient's lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.... [I]ts smaller size and magnetic composition would allow it to shape-shift more easily and better navigate the intricate shape of a lung's network of airways, which can look like a tree....

Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment.... Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, said the autonomous robot is "very novel and interesting technology" that could become potentially useful in areas outside the lungs, most notably the heart. The device's autonomous capability is its unique factor, he said, and has the capability to change invasive surgeries. "I can imagine a future," he said, "where a full [cancer-screening] CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: 'Go get it.' "
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This Snakelike Robot Slithers Down Your Lungs and Could Spot Cancer More

This Snakelike Robot Slithers Down Your Lungs and Could Spot Cancer

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  • Real life tentacle porn!

  • Why on earth would you want an autonomous surgical robot that is only going to be used under the supervision of a doctor anyway?

    >the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: 'Go get it.' "
    So... it's not actually autonomous?

    • From the study:

      Since the magnetic catheter is designed to shape autonomously to the predetermined path, the surgeon is completely relieved of the cognitive burden of navigation.

      • Presuming this civilization maintains its existence for a decade or two longer it seems these ingenious intruders will multiply in all sorts of ways to be inserted into our bodies for medical and surveillance and even body regularity purposes whether we like it or not. They may take over things like toothbrushes and observations of insulin production and perhaps replace the telephone and even artificially stimulate our perceptive senses in the growth of the metaverse to totally manipulate basic motivations

    • Not to worry. The word "autonomous" appears to be utilized in the loosest possible fashion here. It appears to be a pretty dumb device not just guided but magnetically moved by a mass of external machinery along a "predetermined" path. So it doesn't even autonomously determine its path.

      It really is too bad. If you truly had something like this that was autonomous, it might end war when weaponized. Who would go to battle under the threat of having a bucket of robotic worms sprinkled from helicopters to bore

      • Just like machine guns were supposed to end war? You want to talk a horrifying game changer?

        I have no confidence that the invention of increasingly horrific weapons will ever make make war any less appealing - after all the people who profit from war never set foot on the battle field, and dealing with poor troop morale is an ancient military art.

        Nuclear (and potentially biological) weapons are the one partial exception - once the losing party can ensure that no one wins, it greatly reduces the appeal of a

  • Rrr (Score:2)

    by Sneftel ( 15416 )

    roughly 2 millimeters thick â" about double the size of a ballpoint pen tip â" and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long.

    PICK A UNIT AND STICK WITH IT

  • No way in hell am i going to let a robot snake go in my body, especially my lungs because i need them to breathe with and if the snake fail or fouls things up then what, i think big pharma and the medical industry has turned into murder incorporated

    • Re: Nope, not my lungs (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Saturday April 02, 2022 @02:38PM (#62411524)
      Hm. Lets think this through. You have a cancerous tumor in your lung. Your options are

      a)have a guy crack open your chest like an alien movie, go to town on you with a scalpel, and pray his hand doesn’t quiver by more than a millimeter as he tries to remove a tumor that’s wrapped around a major nerve or artery.
      b) chemotherapy which put you out of commission for 12-18 months because, aside from all the side effects that youve probably heard about, nobody EVER talks about chemo brain fog, which is totally real and cuts your intelligence down by about 25 iq points.
      c) a very creepy but near-microscopic robot worm that can be guided by external magnets, controlled by a computer program, that can sit inside you and slowly nibble away at the tumor.
      D) take something homeopathic, trust in the power of prayer, and die quickly.


      Its a free country, you can do,what you want, but until we get FAR better anti-cancer drugs, I’d go with option C.

    • Didn't we have a story on Slashdot, sometime in the last couple of years, about one of our very own editors (msmash I think) getting a surgical camera stuck inside him for a number of days?

    • And what if it sheds its skin while it's in there? *shudder*

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • From the summary and the quoted article : "roughly 2 millimeters thick ... and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long."

    Let's see, a tenth of an inch is about 2.5 mm. So this "snake" is 2 mm across and less than 2.5 mm long. How is that a snake?? More like a slightly elongated spheroid.

    Something wrong here.

    • From reading the abstract, it seems it is a catheter, so it has 'infinite' length. Only metric here is the width, which is 2mm OR 1/10th of the inch for the metric-impaired.

      It is not a self-propelling robot going thought your lungs. It is just a very thin catheter, which is too thin to allow direct articulation, so they are driving it with the help of external magnetic fields.

  • “You see, their young enter through the ears and wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex. This has the effect of rendering the victim extremely susceptible to suggestion... Later, as they grow, follows madness and death”

  • Sorry, that one's been done already.

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