Robotic System Treats Brain Clots With Steerable Needles
The odds of a person getting an intracerebral hemorrhage, or brain clot, are one in 50 over his or her lifetime. A new image-guided surgical system under development at Vanderbilt University employs tiny steerable needles - about the size of those used for biopsies - to penetrate the brain with minimal damage and suction away the blood clot that has formed. The system is a collaboration between mechanical engineer Robert Webster and neurosurgeon Kyle Weaver.
Transcript
00:00:07 hi I'm Kyle Weaver I'm one of the assistant professors of neurosurgery here at Vanderbilt intracerebral Hemorrhage or bleeding into the brain is a very common medical problem unfortunately the mortality of this after 90 days can be as high as 40% we also find this increasing in frequency due to the Aging of the PO pop ation and its association with other
00:00:33 lifestyle issues such as high blood pressure and diabetes unfortunately there are very few medical or surgical treatments for this problem we tend not to operate on these blood clots because often times they're in an area of the brain where operating would cause more harm than good similarly we have to go straight into the blood clot often times through important structures and we have
00:01:00 to make a significant opening in the brain itself the robots that you see here in this video offer a wonderful opportunity to revisit operating on these blood clots the robots offer the opportunity to make a very small opening in the brain and can be guided by Imaging such as ultrasound while that's occurring similarly because of their steerable
00:01:28 nature they can be passed around instead of through vital portions of the brain the blood clot can then be removed from within we feel that in the future further development of this technology will allow us to treat this significant public health problem which has a devastating effect with greater safety and efficiency so I'm Bob Webster a
00:01:55 mechanical engineering Professor here at Vanderbilt um and a couple years ago we started building these steerable needles with the idea of trying to help doctors reach places that they couldn't reach before and so really the thought was can we help doctors go around corners as they're doing surgery and reach behind things uh and not have to go through uh tissues that don't need to be damaged in
00:02:16 surgery and so we started developing these steerable needles with the idea of reaching brain tumors in the middle of the head that were extremely difficult to reach um and then about a year ago we thought oh wow this same technology we've been working on for a couple years now could used for cerebral hemorrhages and we could actually provide a solution for this 40% of people who are going to
00:02:37 die if they get this and this was really compelling to me personally because my father actually had one of these a couple of years ago um and at the time Uh I that there was no good treatments for him I mean all they could do was give him some drugs and hope that he would you know somehow uh get better and just try and decompress the brain with uh some drugs that that really don't
00:02:59 work that well cuz 40 % of the people are going to die uh and so if we could provide some kind of solution that would let doctors go in through a single needle hole and reach straight into the Hemorrhage and suck out that blood this could save a lot of lives and so that was a really compelling problem to me personally to work on with this technology my name is Philip swany I'm a
00:03:19 graduate student in mechanical engineering here at Vanderbilt University um and I've been working on this project for just under a year now and in that time we've gone from just an idea to an actual robot which we're able to use to perform some experiments and remove some Phantom cloths made of gelatin um and really what I love so much about this project is that at the
00:03:39 end of the day when I go home I can be assured of the fact that the work I'm doing is helping people um our ultimate goal here is to end up in the operating room with our robot where we can actually operate through a needle size hole rather than the large incisions they have to make today and remove the clot from the inside out um and what we really want to do is take that 40%
00:04:00 mortality rate um that patients who have these clots see um and take that down to zero um with the work that we're doing [Music]