'Snakebots' taking on larger role in medicine

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Keith Srakocic / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Prof. Howie Choset (right) stands beside a robot as staff researcher Florinan Enner uses a controller to make it climb at their lab. (CP)

PITTSBURGH -- Imagine a tiny snake robot crawling through your body, helping a surgeon identify diseases and perform operations.

It's not science fiction. Scientists and doctors are using the creeping metallic tools to perform surgery on hearts, prostate cancer and other diseased organs. The 'snakebots' carry tiny cameras, scissors and forceps, and even more advanced sensors are in the works. For now, they're powered by tethers that humans control. But experts say the day is coming when some robots will roam the body on their own.

"It won't be very long before we have robots that are nanobots, meaning they will actually be inside the body without tethers," said Dr. Michael Argenziano, the chief of adult cardiac surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and the Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

Argenziano was involved with some of the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration clinical trials on robotic heart surgery more than 10 years ago. Now he says snake robots have become a commonly used tool that gives surgeons a whole new perspective.

"It's like the ability to have little hands inside the patients, as if the surgeon had been shrunken, and was working on the heart valve," he said.

But Argenziano and experts in robotics say the new creations work best when they're designed for very specific tasks. "The robot is a tool. It is no different in that sense than a scalpel. It's really a master-slave device," he said.

Howie Choset has been researching and building robots, particularly snake robots, at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University for years.

Choset believes his snake robot and others similar to it help reduce medical costs by making complex surgeries faster and easier. Choset says his new design is smaller and more flexible than earlier models: The diameter of the head is less than the size of a dime.

The size of surgical robots allows surgeons to operate with far less damage to the body, helping the patient heal faster. For example, instead of opening the entire chest up during heart surgery, a small incision is made, and the robot crawls inside to the proper spot.

Dr. Ashutosh Tewari of the Cornell University Medical Center has used robotic tools to perform thousands of prostate operations. He said the precision of the tiny robotic tool is vital not just to cutting out cancerous tumors, but to seeing exactly what nerves to leave intact.

Tewari said he's most excited about the potential for surgical robots to do things humans can't do. He said the variety of sensors available for surgical robots keeps expanding, even as they get smaller. He said they may one day be able to test chemicals or blood in the body, or even the electrical connections in nerves.

Choset has also built larger snake robots designed for search and rescue, or just exploration. They can climb poles or trees and then look around through a camera in the head, and slither through places humans can't reach.

"We sent our snake robots into these caves off the coast of the Red Sea to look for evidence of ancient Egyptian ships," he said. "To me, archaeology is like search and rescue, but everyone's been dead for 5,000 years," reducing the pressure.

Another expert at Carnegie Mellon stresses that there's still an enormous gap between humans and even the most high-tech robots. Manuela Veloso noted robots have been built that excel at one or two tasks -- but not at the variety of tasks humans perform without even thinking.

"I believe we are much closer to having robots be able to coexist with humans. The beautiful thing is you see the robots learning."

-- The Associated Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 30, 2012 C13