Magnetic Organ Retractor Makes Laparoscopic Surgery Easier & More Effective

A team of Vanderbilt University engineers are using magnetic force to design new and improved instruments for minimally invasive surgery. The use of magnetic actuation allows them to create tools that are more flexible and more powerful than conventional designs, which place the instruments on the end of long sticks. The first device of this type that they have designed is an organ retractor that repositions organs like the liver when required for an operation. The device's internal units do not contain any expensive and delicate electronics so they can be easily sterilized and, if manufactured in bulk, could be made inexpensively enough to be disposable.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] so ideally um the way that magnetic coupling can improve uh surgical procedure is uh to have all the uh robotic instrument entering from a single incision to be deployed inside the abdominal cavity and uh manipulated and controlled by magnetic fields so this would reduce the number of incisions required for

00:00:37 abdominal surgery down to a single incision and also would provide a very uh large workspace for the surgery to be effective what I really liked about the project is the fact that it makes the mechanical the very tough mechanical uh part in a in a biomedical way meaning that we can uh exploit Motors and magnets to perform surgical tasks that can really benefit the outcome for

00:01:08 surgical procedure uh for for patients so here is the uh external controller that embeds uh an anchoring permanent magnets that it used for to couple with another magnets inside the device and the two are used for moving the device around and uh stab dock where the device is inside inside the human body the other magnets is instead controlled by a motor

00:01:39 and its rotation allow a second magnets coule with this one inside the device to rotate uh uh at the same frequency and these allow to have wireless mechanical transfer of power so that the internal uh magnets is then considered like an internal motor but with a higher power specification that than normal micro motors have so the instrument is introduced through a surgical incision

00:02:14 and manipulated by the sergeon so in this case we see the external unit and the actuation magnet that is spinning we see here the external handle that has uh the magnets that couples with the internal uh instrument and here we see the internal instrument retracting a lob of the liver to expose the gold bladder this is the external handle and by moving it we are uh moving the internal

00:02:42 instrument that is CED magnetically across the abdominal wall as we see here so this is the internal instrument the surgical retractor that is moving around moved by the external handle