Micromedical robots, or microrobots, have the potential to revolutionize many aspects of medicine.
In the not-too-distant future, the surgeons who treat our diseases may be tiny machines that swim around our bodies, track down tumors or remove clots from even the smallest of arteries.
If this sounds like science fiction, you're not wrong: many movies have often played on the concept of reducing machines to the size of a single cell, but over the past few years, advances in robotics and materials science have brought the idea closer to reality.
So what would it take to create an intelligent robot that can operate independently?
According to a report by Knowable Magazine , roboticist Bradley Nelson of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zürich), who has spent his career working on creating microscopic devices, confirms that engineers have already built robots no larger than a microbe, It can move and sense its environment.
"The next major challenge is to bring some kind of intelligence to these machines so that they can function independently, taking human operators out of the equation completely," says Nelson.
What are the requirements for creating an accurate intelligent robot?
It also asked two other questions: How can it be used in the real world? And what medical functions can such precision machines provide us? These questions included a reference scientific paper published in 2010 in the journal " Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering".
The researchers believe that a robot in general, of any size, operates in an unknown environment, adapts to its surroundings, and can move to achieve a goal. The classic way of thinking is that there are 3 pillars of robots: First: Sensing the robot has to do in some way to gather information about its surroundings. Second: There is a movement that must have some kind of operating mechanism so that it can interact with this surrounding world. Third: There is a computer process that must know what actions it will take at any time.
"In my work, I usually try to build these elements into machines the size of a single cell, a few hundred microns across," Nelson says. He explained that once you get to less than a micron, the kinds of physics that dominate the environment around the robot changes, there are things like the random movement of atoms and molecules that will affect it, so the work becomes more like studying chemistry than robots.
The potential impact of precision medical robots
According to a study published in the journal " Annual Review of Control, Robotics and Autonomous Systems," precision medical robots, or microrobots, have the potential to revolutionize many aspects of medicine.
As technology advances, we can imagine precise robots capable of carrying out complex, sequential operations, potentially performing relatively simple functions in many cases under the direct supervision or control of a physician.
Microbots can be used for local delivery of chemical and biological materials, and directed drug delivery to increase drug concentration in the area of interest, and reduce the risk of side effects in the rest of the body. It can also be used to place a radioactive source near the tumor cells, and the radioactive energy leads to the death of the cells near the radioactive source.
Microrobots can also assist in transplanting and enhancing differentiated stem cells in vivo, where stem cells have huge potential for future therapies (eg, regeneration of lost hearing and vision).
Micro robots can also be used to remove materials by mechanical means in the ablation method, such as operations to remove fatty deposits from the inner walls of blood vessels, or ultrasound ablation to destroy an object such as a kidney stone.
It's no wonder that science-fiction predictions are coming true so soon, that the surgeons of the future who treat our diseases are tiny, intelligent microbots that swim around our bodies, operate independently, and are sure to have the potential to revolutionize medicine and increase the quality of healthcare in the future.
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