Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach. The new “magnetic tentacle robot,” which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long, could eventually have its use expanded to help doctors more thoroughly investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas.

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient’s lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.

Doctors now use a medical device called a bronchoscope to examine a person’s lungs and airways. Normally 3.5 to 4 millimeters in diameter, the device enters through a patient’s nose or mouth and goes into the lung’s airways, called bronchioles. However, the bronchoscope’s width and rigidity limits how deep doctors can venture down a patient’s lungs in search of cancerous or other problematic tissues. Parts of the lungs are left unexamined, potentially causing harm.

The robot from the United Kingdom would be the first to not require manual guidance from a physician. Magnets mounted on robotic arms outside the patient would be used to help guide the device into the lungs. Once inserted into a patient, the magnets would help the robot move down a patient’s lungs autonomously, following a map of the patient’s lung network, which would be mapped out before the procedure. Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment. Depending on where a tumor is, this may be the only way to reach it successfully.

“I can imagine a future,” says Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, “where a full CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: ‘Go get it.’ ” Despite that, Thakor said any autonomous robot would face an uphill climb being accepted by clinicians, as “people who do the clinical practice … guard their business very carefully until they get trained.”

(Pranshu Verma. thewashingtonpost.com, 01.04.2022. Adaptado)

Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach. The new “magnetic tentacle robot,” which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long, could eventually have its use expanded to help doctors more thoroughly investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas.

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient’s lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.

Doctors now use a medical device called a bronchoscope to examine a person’s lungs and airways. Normally 3.5 to 4 millimeters in diameter, the device enters through a patient’s nose or mouth and goes into the lung’s airways, called bronchioles. However, the bronchoscope’s width and rigidity limits how deep doctors can venture down a patient’s lungs in search of cancerous or other problematic tissues. Parts of the lungs are left unexamined, potentially causing harm.

The robot from the United Kingdom would be the first to not require manual guidance from a physician. Magnets mounted on robotic arms outside the patient would be used to help guide the device into the lungs. Once inserted into a patient, the magnets would help the robot move down a patient’s lungs autonomously, following a map of the patient’s lung network, which would be mapped out before the procedure. Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment. Depending on where a tumor is, this may be the only way to reach it successfully.

“I can imagine a future,” says Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, “where a full CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: ‘Go get it.’ ” Despite that, Thakor said any autonomous robot would face an uphill climb being accepted by clinicians, as “people who do the clinical practice … guard their business very carefully until they get trained.”

(Pranshu Verma. thewashingtonpost.com, 01.04.2022. Adaptado)

Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach. The new “magnetic tentacle robot,” which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long, could eventually have its use expanded to help doctors more thoroughly investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas.

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient’s lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.

Doctors now use a medical device called a bronchoscope to examine a person’s lungs and airways. Normally 3.5 to 4 millimeters in diameter, the device enters through a patient’s nose or mouth and goes into the lung’s airways, called bronchioles. However, the bronchoscope’s width and rigidity limits how deep doctors can venture down a patient’s lungs in search of cancerous or other problematic tissues. Parts of the lungs are left unexamined, potentially causing harm.

The robot from the United Kingdom would be the first to not require manual guidance from a physician. Magnets mounted on robotic arms outside the patient would be used to help guide the device into the lungs. Once inserted into a patient, the magnets would help the robot move down a patient’s lungs autonomously, following a map of the patient’s lung network, which would be mapped out before the procedure. Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment. Depending on where a tumor is, this may be the only way to reach it successfully.

“I can imagine a future,” says Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, “where a full CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: ‘Go get it.’ ” Despite that, Thakor said any autonomous robot would face an uphill climb being accepted by clinicians, as “people who do the clinical practice … guard their business very carefully until they get trained.”

(Pranshu Verma. thewashingtonpost.com, 01.04.2022. Adaptado)

Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach. The new “magnetic tentacle robot,” which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long, could eventually have its use expanded to help doctors more thoroughly investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas.

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient’s lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.

Doctors now use a medical device called a bronchoscope to examine a person’s lungs and airways. Normally 3.5 to 4 millimeters in diameter, the device enters through a patient’s nose or mouth and goes into the lung’s airways, called bronchioles. However, the bronchoscope’s width and rigidity limits how deep doctors can venture down a patient’s lungs in search of cancerous or other problematic tissues. Parts of the lungs are left unexamined, potentially causing harm.

The robot from the United Kingdom would be the first to not require manual guidance from a physician. Magnets mounted on robotic arms outside the patient would be used to help guide the device into the lungs. Once inserted into a patient, the magnets would help the robot move down a patient’s lungs autonomously, following a map of the patient’s lung network, which would be mapped out before the procedure. Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment. Depending on where a tumor is, this may be the only way to reach it successfully.

“I can imagine a future,” says Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, “where a full CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: ‘Go get it.’ ” Despite that, Thakor said any autonomous robot would face an uphill climb being accepted by clinicians, as “people who do the clinical practice … guard their business very carefully until they get trained.”

(Pranshu Verma. thewashingtonpost.com, 01.04.2022. Adaptado)

Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach. The new “magnetic tentacle robot,” which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long, could eventually have its use expanded to help doctors more thoroughly investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas.

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient’s lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.

Doctors now use a medical device called a bronchoscope to examine a person’s lungs and airways. Normally 3.5 to 4 millimeters in diameter, the device enters through a patient’s nose or mouth and goes into the lung’s airways, called bronchioles. However, the bronchoscope’s width and rigidity limits how deep doctors can venture down a patient’s lungs in search of cancerous or other problematic tissues. Parts of the lungs are left unexamined, potentially causing harm.

The robot from the United Kingdom would be the first to not require manual guidance from a physician. Magnets mounted on robotic arms outside the patient would be used to help guide the device into the lungs. Once inserted into a patient, the magnets would help the robot move down a patient’s lungs autonomously, following a map of the patient’s lung network, which would be mapped out before the procedure. Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment. Depending on where a tumor is, this may be the only way to reach it successfully.

“I can imagine a future,” says Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, “where a full CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: ‘Go get it.’ ” Despite that, Thakor said any autonomous robot would face an uphill climb being accepted by clinicians, as “people who do the clinical practice … guard their business very carefully until they get trained.”

(Pranshu Verma. thewashingtonpost.com, 01.04.2022. Adaptado)

Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach. The new “magnetic tentacle robot,” which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long, could eventually have its use expanded to help doctors more thoroughly investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas.

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient’s lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.

Doctors now use a medical device called a bronchoscope to examine a person’s lungs and airways. Normally 3.5 to 4 millimeters in diameter, the device enters through a patient’s nose or mouth and goes into the lung’s airways, called bronchioles. However, the bronchoscope’s width and rigidity limits how deep doctors can venture down a patient’s lungs in search of cancerous or other problematic tissues. Parts of the lungs are left unexamined, potentially causing harm.

The robot from the United Kingdom would be the first to not require manual guidance from a physician. Magnets mounted on robotic arms outside the patient would be used to help guide the device into the lungs. Once inserted into a patient, the magnets would help the robot move down a patient’s lungs autonomously, following a map of the patient’s lung network, which would be mapped out before the procedure. Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment. Depending on where a tumor is, this may be the only way to reach it successfully.

“I can imagine a future,” says Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, “where a full CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: ‘Go get it.’ ” Despite that, Thakor said any autonomous robot would face an uphill climb being accepted by clinicians, as “people who do the clinical practice … guard their business very carefully until they get trained.”

(Pranshu Verma. thewashingtonpost.com, 01.04.2022. Adaptado)

Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach. The new “magnetic tentacle robot,” which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long, could eventually have its use expanded to help doctors more thoroughly investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas.

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient’s lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.

Doctors now use a medical device called a bronchoscope to examine a person’s lungs and airways. Normally 3.5 to 4 millimeters in diameter, the device enters through a patient’s nose or mouth and goes into the lung’s airways, called bronchioles. However, the bronchoscope’s width and rigidity limits how deep doctors can venture down a patient’s lungs in search of cancerous or other problematic tissues. Parts of the lungs are left unexamined, potentially causing harm.

The robot from the United Kingdom would be the first to not require manual guidance from a physician. Magnets mounted on robotic arms outside the patient would be used to help guide the device into the lungs. Once inserted into a patient, the magnets would help the robot move down a patient’s lungs autonomously, following a map of the patient’s lung network, which would be mapped out before the procedure. Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment. Depending on where a tumor is, this may be the only way to reach it successfully.

“I can imagine a future,” says Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, “where a full CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: ‘Go get it.’ ” Despite that, Thakor said any autonomous robot would face an uphill climb being accepted by clinicians, as “people who do the clinical practice … guard their business very carefully until they get trained.”

(Pranshu Verma. thewashingtonpost.com, 01.04.2022. Adaptado)

Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach. The new “magnetic tentacle robot,” which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long, could eventually have its use expanded to help doctors more thoroughly investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas.

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient’s lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.

Doctors now use a medical device called a bronchoscope to examine a person’s lungs and airways. Normally 3.5 to 4 millimeters in diameter, the device enters through a patient’s nose or mouth and goes into the lung’s airways, called bronchioles. However, the bronchoscope’s width and rigidity limits how deep doctors can venture down a patient’s lungs in search of cancerous or other problematic tissues. Parts of the lungs are left unexamined, potentially causing harm.

The robot from the United Kingdom would be the first to not require manual guidance from a physician. Magnets mounted on robotic arms outside the patient would be used to help guide the device into the lungs. Once inserted into a patient, the magnets would help the robot move down a patient’s lungs autonomously, following a map of the patient’s lung network, which would be mapped out before the procedure. Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment. Depending on where a tumor is, this may be the only way to reach it successfully.

“I can imagine a future,” says Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, “where a full CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: ‘Go get it.’ ” Despite that, Thakor said any autonomous robot would face an uphill climb being accepted by clinicians, as “people who do the clinical practice … guard their business very carefully until they get trained.”

(Pranshu Verma. thewashingtonpost.com, 01.04.2022. Adaptado)

Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach. The new “magnetic tentacle robot,” which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long, could eventually have its use expanded to help doctors more thoroughly investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas.

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient’s lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.

Doctors now use a medical device called a bronchoscope to examine a person’s lungs and airways. Normally 3.5 to 4 millimeters in diameter, the device enters through a patient’s nose or mouth and goes into the lung’s airways, called bronchioles. However, the bronchoscope’s width and rigidity limits how deep doctors can venture down a patient’s lungs in search of cancerous or other problematic tissues. Parts of the lungs are left unexamined, potentially causing harm.

The robot from the United Kingdom would be the first to not require manual guidance from a physician. Magnets mounted on robotic arms outside the patient would be used to help guide the device into the lungs. Once inserted into a patient, the magnets would help the robot move down a patient’s lungs autonomously, following a map of the patient’s lung network, which would be mapped out before the procedure. Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment. Depending on where a tumor is, this may be the only way to reach it successfully.

“I can imagine a future,” says Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, “where a full CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: ‘Go get it.’ ” Despite that, Thakor said any autonomous robot would face an uphill climb being accepted by clinicians, as “people who do the clinical practice … guard their business very carefully until they get trained.”

(Pranshu Verma. thewashingtonpost.com, 01.04.2022. Adaptado)

Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach. The new “magnetic tentacle robot,” which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long, could eventually have its use expanded to help doctors more thoroughly investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas.

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient’s lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.

Doctors now use a medical device called a bronchoscope to examine a person’s lungs and airways. Normally 3.5 to 4 millimeters in diameter, the device enters through a patient’s nose or mouth and goes into the lung’s airways, called bronchioles. However, the bronchoscope’s width and rigidity limits how deep doctors can venture down a patient’s lungs in search of cancerous or other problematic tissues. Parts of the lungs are left unexamined, potentially causing harm.

The robot from the United Kingdom would be the first to not require manual guidance from a physician. Magnets mounted on robotic arms outside the patient would be used to help guide the device into the lungs. Once inserted into a patient, the magnets would help the robot move down a patient’s lungs autonomously, following a map of the patient’s lung network, which would be mapped out before the procedure. Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment. Depending on where a tumor is, this may be the only way to reach it successfully.

“I can imagine a future,” says Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, “where a full CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: ‘Go get it.’ ” Despite that, Thakor said any autonomous robot would face an uphill climb being accepted by clinicians, as “people who do the clinical practice … guard their business very carefully until they get trained.”

(Pranshu Verma. thewashingtonpost.com, 01.04.2022. Adaptado)