Microrobotics in the vascular network: present status and next challenges
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REVIEW PAPER
Microrobotics in the vascular network: present status and next challenges Sylvain Martel
Received: 29 February 2012 / Revised: 1 October 2012 / Accepted: 29 October 2012 / Published online: 26 January 2013 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Abstract The field of microrobotics dedicated to medical interventions although relatively new, is progressing at a very fast pace. Among the various accesses inside the body being investigated, the vascular network with close to 100,000 km of potential routes in each human and offering a large range of interventional opportunities has been of special interest in recent years. Although significant progresses and milestones have been achieved in this particular field of research, some important challenges remain to be solved before microrobotics in the human vasculature becomes a reality. Nonetheless, despite these challenges, some applications are already on the horizon. This paper aims at providing a quick overview of the present status of the field of microrobotics for interventions in the vascular network and to describe the main critical challenges that must be met in the short term to enable new or enhanced medical interventional procedures that may bring potential great outcomes for the patients. Keywords Medical imaging modalities . Targeted interventions . magnetic nanoparticles . vascular network . medical microrobotics
1 Introduction In the field of microrobotics, several recent papers have presented theoretical formulations with simulated or experimental data where the authors claim that the results could S. Martel (*) NanoRobotics Laboratory, Department of Computer and Software Engineering, and Institute of Biomedical Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal (EPM), Campus of the Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada e-mail: [email protected]
potentially be applied in the human vascular network. Although of great scientific values, in many instances, the results concern only the controlled displacement of a small untethered object using an experimental setup that often failed to take into account all the main critical physiological, technological, and medical constraints. As a simple example, besides the lack of information about the possibility of scaling many of these relatively small experimental apparatus at the human scale, in these papers and related experiments, optical microscopy is most often used to gather the position of the micro-object (often referred to as a microrobot) required to compute the corrective actions using a given real-time control algorithm. But such imaging modality cannot be applied when performing closed-loop navigation control in the vascular network. Instead, other imaging modalities need to be considered. These imaging modalities can add substantial constraints such as latency in the control loop that can often be beyond a threshold that would fail to guarantee robustness, while lacking sufficient spatial resolution for tracking microscale devices or robots. Only one of these two examples among a lo
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