"New Frontiers in Robotic Surgery" - a feature in the IEEE Pulse magazine

Excerpt from the article:

“With microrobotics you can carry drugs to the source of the problem, which means you need much less drug,” says Bradley Nelson, a professor of robotics and intelligent systems at ETH Zürich, Switzerland (Figure 5). Nelson and his team have developed a cylindrical microrobot that is about one-third of a millimeter in diameter and one millimeter long, composed of magnetic material such as iron, and coated with biocompatible polymers. To the naked eye, it resembles an innocuous whisker or piece of dust (Figure 6).

These microrobots can be loaded with a drug, then directed to enter the eyeball by applying magnetic fields outside the head. The guidance system involves eight different electromagnets, through which electric currents must be precisely controlled via algorithms developed by the robotics community. Once they reach their retinal target, the drug begins to diffuse. So far, they have only been tested in animals, but a similar system has been used to guide tiny catheters into the heart to ablate arrhythmia in seven patients during a clinical trial in Switzerland.

Read full article at external pageIEEE Pulsecall_made.