Our researchers should be jumping for joy. This breakthru should allow them to design robots that could deliver drugs directly to the site of the clot or bleed and release tPA if a clot or glue into the aneurysm to stop the bleed. Further research should allow the robots to drill thru the clot. If our fucking failures of stroke associations do nothing with this information that just proves why they are fucking failures.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=170175&CultureCode=en
The quest to develop a wireless micro-robot for biomedical
applications requires a small-scale “motor” that can be wirelessly
powered through biological media. While magnetic fields can be used to
power small robots wirelessly, they do not provide selectivity since all
actuators (the components controlling motion) under the same magnetic
field just follow the same motion. To address this intrinsic limitation
of magnetic actuation, a team of German researchers has developed a way
to use microbubbles to provide the specificity needed to power
micro-robots for biomedical applications.
This week in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, the team
describes this new approach that offers multiple advantages over
previous techniques.
“First, by applying ultrasound at different frequencies, multiple
actuators can be individually addressed; second, the actuators require
no on-board electronics which make them smaller, lighter and safer; and
third, the approach is scalable to the sub-millimeter size,” said Tian
Qiu, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in
Germany.
The research team encountered some surprises along the way. Normally a
special material, like a magnetic or piezoelectric material, is
required for an actuator. In this case, they used a standard commercial
polymer that simply traps air bubbles, and then used the air-liquid
interface of the trapped bubbles to convert the ultrasound power into
mechanical motion.
“We found that a thin surface (30-120 micrometers effective
thickness) with appropriate topological patterning can provide
propulsion force using ultrasound, and thousands of these bubbles
together can push a device at millimeter scale,” Qiu said. “The
simplicity of the structure and material to accomplish this task was a
pleasant surprise.”
The team is already looking forward to developing their actuator further.
“The next steps are to increase the propulsive force of the
functional surface, to integrate the actuator into a useful biomedical
device, and then to test it in a real biological environment, including
in vivo,” Qiu said.
The adoption of micro-structured surfaces as wireless actuators opens
promising new possibilities in the development of miniaturized devices
and tools for fluidic environments accessible by low intensity
ultrasound fields. These functional surfaces could serve as
ready-to-attach wireless actuators, powering miniaturized biomedical
devices for applications such as active endoscopes.
###
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/109/19/10.1063/1.4967194
No comments:
Post a Comment