Robots cross our blood to cure diseases

Dr. David Zarrouk, director of the bio-inspired and medical robotics laboratory of Ben Gurion University of the Negev and lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, carefully places the little robot in a cleaned pork intestine on his table and presses l & # 39; switch. About the size of an inch, the miniature robot comes to life and begins to cross the intestine, all along the other end.

The BGU researcher draws his inspiration from the film "Fantastic Voyage" of the 1960s. In the film, a shrinking submarine swims in the blood of a scientist to repair his brain. Dr. Zarrouk hopes to transform what he saw on the screen in reality. "You can call it a bowel bot," says Dr. Zarrouk. He is not alone.

Since the turn of the century, scientists have observed medical devices or implantable particles, sometimes as tiny as unmanageable pills, as a long-awaited solution that could allow them to monitor the body's functions. outside while avoiding surgeries. But now researchers are developing tiny robots that are emerging as the next frontier in medical science.

At Ben Gurion University, Dr. Zarrouk refines his stomach to one day replace the expensive and uncomfortable intestinal diagnostic procedures in which doctors push a tube with a camera down the throat and into the throat. # 39; patient's stomach – to look for ulcers, polyps or tumors.

These emerging discoveries must pbad multiple tests and regulations before they are available on the medical market – they are all in the lab stage right now. And even in the laboratory, the transition from stationary electronics to robots that swim in body fluids and blood is not simple. To make his bot fully functional, Dr. Zarrouk needs to halve his current size in order to fit inside a small capsule. The patients could then consume it, and the doctors holding joysticks could direct its movement in the body. The digestive robot would cross the intestines, transmit the information from inside and finally leave the body in a natural way, with excrement.

But researchers are convinced that these robots are the future of medical electronics ingested. The enemy for UCSD researchers, for example, is a difficult client, and he needs advanced solutions like the one he's developing to really beat him, say the scientists.

When a young Dr. Zarrouk watched the film that was going to drive him half a century later to design his bot, it was pure science fiction. "Now it's no longer fiction – it's just science," says Dr. Zarrouk, and that's the future.