A Robotic Snake Repairs Injured Hearts and Organs

A mechanical robotic snake small enough, strong enough, and flexible enough to fit inside the human body could soon crawl into the heart, saving lives.

The Cardio Articulated Robotic MedProbe (CardioARM) is comprised of a series of articulating links that can be made of any material, and is designed to assist in coronary artery bypass graft (CABG). Other modifications of the technology could assist in laparoscopy (LaparoARM), colonoscopy (GastroARM), and arthroscopy (ArthroARM) procedures. The central element of the technology is a disposable, highly-flexible tele-operated probe, either assuming the shape of its surroundings, or reshaped according to the surgeon's needs. Like playing a video game, the CardioArm is controlled by a joystick and gives 103 degrees of freedom, and can wrap around organs like the heart until it finds the problematic tissue. As it moves through the body, it is programmed to memorize its position, so that it can avoid harming delicate tissues as it retracts from any point. A working channel inside the body of the "snake” allows surgeons to pass tools to regions inside the body, reaching places otherwise impossible to access without a scalpel. A modification of the robotic arm can make the device applicable in abdominal and maxillofacial surgery. The developers hope to one day allow the CardioARM to be inserted through one location, with several arms like tentacles, so each arm could operate in unison on a different part of the body. The CardioARM, under development by Cardiorobotics (Middletown, RI, USA), has so far been used to treat the hearts of pigs, and clinical trials on human patients are expected to start in 2009.

"We are working with robotic snakes for search and rescue operations,” said CardiARM co-developer Alon Wolf, Ph.D. "So we started in the back of our minds thinking: if we can send snakes to crawl inside buildings to look for survivors, then why can't we send the same snake inside our body to fix it?”

"More and more surgery done today is done in minimally invasive ways. Tools in operation rooms are not flexible. The CardioARM is flexible enough for remote and hard to reach anatomies. The heart is a good example... now we don't have to cut open the person,” added Dr. Wolf.

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