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news release:
MRI Used to Steer Microdevices through Veins
Montreal, Canada, 16 March 2007:
Some 40 years after the release of the classic science fiction movie
Fantastic Voyage, researchers in the NanoRobotics Laboratory of École
Polytechnique de Montréal's Department of Computer Engineering and Institute
of Biomedical Engineering have achieved a major technological breakthrough
in the field of medical robotics. They have succeeded for the first time in
guiding, in vivo and via computer control, a microdevice inside an artery,
at a speed of 10 centimetres a second.
Under the direction of Professor Sylvain Martel,
holder of the Canada Research Chair in Micro/Nanosystem Development,
Construction and Validation, and in collaboration with researchers at the Centre
hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM), the Polytechnique team has
succeeded in injecting, propelling and controlling by means of software programs
an initial prototype of an untethered device (a ferromagnetic 1.5- millimetre-diameter
sphere) within the carotid artery of a living animal placed inside a clinical
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system.
Encouraged by these results, staff at the
Polytechnique NanoRobotics Laboratory are currently working to further reduce
the size of the devices so that, within a few years, they can navigate inside
smaller blood vessels.
"Injection and control of nanorobots inside the human body, which contains
nearly 100,000 kilometres of blood vessels, is a promising avenue that could
enable interventional medicine to target sites that so far have remained
inaccessible using modern medical instruments such as catheters," Professor
Martel explained. "In collaboration with our scientific partners, Polytechnique
researchers have begun developing several types of micro- and nanodevices for
novel applications, such as targeted delivery of medications to tumour sites and
diagnoses using navigable bio-sensors."
The results of this scientific breakthrough were
published by Professor Martel and 10 co-authors from École Polytechnique de
Montréal and the CHUM on March 14 in the scientific journal Applied Physics
Letters.
Patent applications have been submitted for this
method of real-time monitoring and guidance of devices for minimally invasive
surgeries using MRI. Commercialization of the technology has been entrusted to
Gestion Univalor, LP.
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