Abstract

Robots, already pervasive in consumer and industrial settings, are only beginning to penetrate healthcare. As a graduate student at MIT for the last six years, I have focused on inventing and commercializing robots that protect health and improve quality of life. As an engineer, I believe it is unacceptable that patients are constrained to undergo invasive and costly surgical procedures, when smarter solutions are possible. Million dollar medical robots are not the answer; we need affordable approaches to improving healthcare that can be rapidly deployed to all of humanity. Currently surgery is the treatment of choice for many forms of cancer; however, it is expensive and highly invasive. New needle-like probes that locally treat disease are beginning to be used but their use is limited to small tumors. My steerable needle demonstrates a simple and effective ways to couple the precision and strength of robots with the intelligence and dexterity of humans. The device is capable of positioning the distal tip of a medical instrument to multiple points in a larger tumor after an instrument has been inserted through a single incision into the body. The device could enable accurate 3D patterns of tissue sampling, drug injection, electrode deployment or ablation therapy across a range of image-guided interventions. Now instead of expensive and highly-invasive surgical procedures for treating cancer, 2-3 hour procedures will be possible where the patient can go home the same day.

Submission Document

Learn More

Email walshcj@mit.edu