medicine - Tag Archive

Robotic Surgical Techniques

9 Replies Jonny Hankins

This weekend I had a very interesting experience. I tried out a few million dollar’s worth of robotic surgery equipment.

The Davinci Robotic Surgery Machine

The da Vinci Robotic Surgery Machine

The system I tried out was designed and built by da Vinci Surgery, and is in use at the Brigham and Women’s hospital here in Massachusetts. The hospital states that over 600 operations have been carried out since 2007 when the technology was introduced without need for further more invasive interventions or serious damage to any patient.

Imagine that you sit in front of a 3 dimensional image and control robotic arms with your own arm and finger movement. The arms are about as thick as pencils, and as there are 4 arms on each robot two surgeons can work together.

The hand controls feature finger grips

Hand controls

The great advantage is that instead of having to make a large cut so that the doctors can get their hands in, the robot makes 5 tiny cuts for the arms to pass through. There is a camera so the surgeons can see inside and they can proceed at a safe distance.

Healing time is cut down, less blood loss, less possibility of infection, less post operative pain and very little scarring, there are many advantages to this type of approach. The machinery is very easy to use. My 7 year old son could take tiny elastic bands off a test bed and place them round objects about the size of the end of my little finger, at a distance of 3 metres!

One issue is however that some people are dubious about a surgeon operating using this type of machinery, they might feel that a hand is better then a robotic arm. Having used one (not on a patient I grant you) I personally would not have any problem accepting a procedure of this type.

Robotic surgery makes us think of computerized machinery with Kraftwerk type movement and voices, but this machinery is nothing of the sort. It handles like an extension of your own body, the movement is very real and precise and in some ways the robotic arm is easier to manipulate than a human counterpart. It can turn 360 degrees upon itself, has full rotation capability and the magnification makes the process seem easier. I was shocked when I saw how small the area was that we were working on.

A training program was also on display, a series of tests to improve performance and present each operator with a score. A skilled operator can tie a knot in a piece of string or link tiny elastic bands together that would be extremely tricky using human fingers.

Below I have a series of photos and here is a link to a video showing an actual procedure so stop reading here and skip straight to the comments section if you don’t want to see them.

A Dummy Up

A dummy shows entrance

Robotic Surgery

Robotic surgery in action

Injections Without Needles

9 Replies Jonny Hankins

If there is one thing I don’t like it is getting an injection. I have never had a flu shot (but never had the Flu) and part of the reason is the needle effect.

This may all be coming to an end though as scientists here at MIT have devised a way to inject medicine without a needle. See this article for a description.

Needle free injection

The new MIT developed needle-less system

This is not the first time that such a development has been publicized, but a technological and practical leap forward has been made. The MIT system is new in that it can deliver medicine at different depths. This means that medicines can now be inserted into muscle or fatty tissue at will and with ease.

The system uses magnets to achieve delivery, and this is the breakthrough that makes the system so interesting. Needle-less systems have been available for some years now, but they tend to rely on compressed air and are not flexible in terms of pressure. They medicine enters the body but the depth is not variable.

The MIT device works electrically and the pressure is absolutely flexible, allowing the operator to change the pressure of entry but then also lower it to enable distribution to the surrounding tissue. In other words lower pressure can be used to pass through the skin of a child, a process that does not require the same force as passing through an adult’s skin. The pressure can then be lowered to enable the distribution of the medicine to the surrounding cells once already in the body.

This breakthrough means that medication can be passed through other parts of the body too, for example through the eye tissue and directly into the retina or through the ear drum.

As you can see the importance is not really in my dislike of needles but in the loss of the needle.

Needle injuries are common for health workers, and with this system they are removed from the equation once and for all. No more accidental cross infections!

There are also obvious advantages for people that have to inject themselves daily for example in the case of diabetes.

Several major drugs companies have expressed an interest in developing and marketing the product so it looks like the days of the needle might be numbered.

I don’t know if it still hurts a bit though.

What is Synthetic Biology?

4 Replies Jonny Hankins

In my work I write about nanotechnology and synthetic biology and over the next couple of weeks I would like to describe what is happening in these high technology fields. I start with synthetic biology. I am not a scientist and cannot give any form of technical description of how they do what they do. I can present a kind of sketch though of what they are doing and their aims.

The first question then must be what is synthetic biology? Well it is something that can be described as engineering, biology, genetics or nanotechnology, the most common description is that of applying the concept of engineering to biological organisms. But what does that actually mean?

Well, synthetic biology aims to design and engineer biologically based parts, novel devices and systems as well as redesigning existing, natural biological systems. Practitioners use a systems approach, an organism is seen as a whole, or a system, and can therefore be engineered, very much like a machine.

you see, kid's stuff

The system is reduced to biological parts (bioparts) whose function is expressed in terms of input/output characteristics. Once these parts have been described in terms of their function, isolated, standardised and syntheticaly reproduced, they can then be combined to from new organisms, very much in the way that an engineer would build a machine using standard devices built from standard parts. It is just that they are parts of a living organism.

These standard parts are defined by their DNA, and this can be manipulated in order to make the perfect part for the perfect device. Parts of the DNA can be removed and synthetic pieces used to replace them. Create the right part that does the right job, put in it a carrier cell (known as chassis) and Bob’s your Uncle, you can start to construct your organism.

The Biobricks Foundation is a not for profit organization that aims to keep a register of these standard parts, maintaining open access and promoting technical standardization, something that is seen as holding the key to the further development of synthetic biology.

Obviously to do all of the above you require technical expertise, the process requires computational modeling in order to analyze the complexities of biological entities and to predict system performance. You require DNA sequencing in order to describe the genome and then of course DNA synthesis, to re-produce either part of or the entire genome itself.

But what are the potential areas of application for this technology, and what can they actually do now?

One of the main fields is undoubtedly medicine. Drugs can be produced that are more effective or have fewer or even no side effects, as the genomes of their active components can be adjusted and synthesized. An example is the development of a synthetic version of the anti-malarial drug Artermisinin that could be industrially and cheaply mass produced, and in the near future antibiotics could become much more efficient.

Another existing application is water that changes colour when in contact with different polluting agents making them instantly recognizable. Switches already exist that react to certain types of input. An example could be a cell that is part of a person’s body that reacts to the stimulus of a certain chemical that in turn stimulates the production of another. Imagine for example a device that reacts to a chemical produced by a cancerous cell. This input causes a reaction that produces another chemical to counteract this presence. All working naturally using the body’s energy to function.

Other developments involve the energy sector, the production of plants for bio mass that are not as wasteful as those used today and even the development of synthetic aviation fuels.

In other fields a synthetic form of the silk produced by the Golden Orb spider is under development. This is an extremely strong, fine and lightweight material that could lead the way towards new specialist engineering materials.

They are even working on living computer memory, and  this article describes breakthroughs and results in DNA computing.

Well this is nothing but reasonable, my memory lives in my brain and the memory of my ancestors in my DNA, and now they have the technology to read it and even change it, so why not use it in a computer?

I have written several articles on this and other related topics on the Bassetti Foundation website, and as I said I am no scientist, so all comments and criticism invited and accepted.