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Tiny, Origami-Inspired Devices to Improve Minimally-Invasive Surgery

Brigham Young University mechanical engineers are working toward surgical technology that will allow for the manufacturing of instruments so small that the size of incisions necessary to accommodate the tools can heal on their own, without sutures. As a part of their work, BYU licensed a series of compliant mechanism technologies to Intuitive Surgical, the maker of the da Vinci Surgical System. BYU's team has engineered new design concepts that eliminate the need for pin joints and other parts, instead relying on the deflection inherent in origami to create motion. One instrument is a robotically-controlled forceps so small it can pass through a hole about three millimeters in size - about the thickness of two pennies held together.

Topics:
Automation Medical Motion Control Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 One of the reasons the medical industry is interested in origami is to create devices that are smaller. They wanted a new concept not just a smaller device but a new way to think about the devices. Origami is often useful in medicine for much the same reason that it's useful in space. If you have something that is flat and sheet-like but you want to get into the body, you want it to go in through as small hole as possible. Doctors are always looking for some kind of way to be less invasive or to be more precise. Or perhaps to do surgeries that require more precision maybe working with nerves or something that is very small.

    00:00:39 BYU has recently entered into an agreement with Intuitive Surgical Incorporated to license patents on devices that have been developed in our lab. Intuitive Surgical is a company that makes the DaVinci robot that does surgeries robotically. Here we can see one of their current devices that used to grasp things or to hold a needle to do suturing. The initial inspiration for the grasping device we worked on was an origami pattern the people commonly called "chompers." Here is a large scale prototype that was based on some origami ideas of reducing the part count. So you can see that here we just have this 3-D printed plastic and here we've actually moved to 3-D printed in stainless steel and we're able to make parts at this 4 millimeter scale. 3-D printing allows us to experiment with

    00:01:31 a shape or prototype very quickly. I can have an idea from the computer to the 3-D printer into our lab for a look in less than a day. We have about a third or fourth of the number of parts of a current device, so many fewer parts. And the parts we have, the complexity of the parts is lower. Our big idea is that we can make things smaller and smaller by using inspiration of things like origami that are very simple. So instead of trying to make their complexity smaller and smaller, we're going for simplicity early. These new devices that we've created to enable robotic surgery at smaller scales to be less invasive, we really feel like going to make a big difference