The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that a robot combined with a swallowable camera could give doctors a better look inside the small intestine. This medical robot, dubbed 'bugbot,' is being developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in its NanoRobotics Laboratory. It will measure less than 800 nanometers in diameter and will transmit thousands of images during its trip inside yourself with its embedded camera. With the six legs attached to the microrobot, CMU researchers want to give more control to camera operators, such as coming back to a suspected lesion. This robot should be ready for human inspection within 2 to 3 years and opens the way for future nanorobots. Read more.
Here are the opening paragraphs of the Post-Gazette article.
The words "intestinal bug" could gain a whole new meaning if a Carnegie Mellon University engineer is successful in his efforts to develop a medical robot for examining the intestinal tract.
Metin Sitti, director of the NanoRobotics Lab, is developing a set of legs that could be incorporated into the swallowable camera-in-a-pill that has become available in the past four years for diagnosing gastrointestinal disorders in the small intestine.
The capsule camera snaps thousands of pictures as it makes its way slowly through the narrow tract, carried by the wave-like peristaltic motion that moves all contents through the intestines.
This picture, from Steve Mellon, of the Post-Gazette, shows Sitti with a prototype of his six-legged intestinal robot. And the newspaper has additional explanations about this robot in this graphical representation of intestinal locomotion.
So far, this robot is not really ready to explore your body.
[Sitti] has devised a simple, three-footed apparatus less than two-thirds of an inch in diameter to test its stopping power in flexible plastic tubes and, in preliminary testing in South Korea, in pig intestines. A six-footed apparatus for testing the inchworm-like locomotion has been assembled and will soon be ready for testing.
The person who designed a robot that could act and think as well as your four-year-old would deserve a Nobel Prize. But there is no public recognition for bringing up several truly human beings.
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
The legged devices thus far do not incorporate a camera and are not designed to be swallowed.
For more information about previous research on this subject, you can read more about Micro Swimming Robots at CMU's NanoRobotics Laboratory.
Here are the goals of the project.
Developing a microrobot which can travel to currently inaccessible parts of the body and perform user directed tasks such as highly localized drug delivery and screening for diseases that are in their very early stages.
And here are the benefits expected by the researchers.
We envision this robot having the capability to swim to inaccessible areas in human body and perform complicated user directed tasks such as diagnosis of diseases at early stages and targeted drug delivery.
Now, let's return to the Post-Gazette which tells us about the future of the 'bugbot.'
If the gutbot proves feasible for the small intestine, other applications may await it in the colon. Though the colon can be visualized with a long, flexible colonoscope, the procedure is not a popular one. Sitti [and his fellow researchers] suggested it may someday be possible to use a legged camera introduced through the anus as a substitute for traditional colonoscopy. They emphasized, however, that such an application is still years away.
Above all, however, the machine has no feelings, it feels no fear and no hope ... it operates according to the pure logic of probability. For this reason I assert that the robot perceives more accurately than man.
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
For that matter, Sitti said, it may be possible to someday equip an intestinal robot to perform surgeries beyond just biopsies. But for now, developing a robot that could improve diagnosis of digestive tract disease is the immediate concern.
Sources: Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 30, 2005; and various websites
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
Medicine
Nanotechnology
Robotics
Vision and Visualization Apps.