Explore more about: Surgical Tools

The lungs are one of the most difficult organs for physicians to navigate. A collaborative team of NIH-funded researchers have built a compact robotic system that can autonomously steer around anatomical obstacles within the lungs of live animals.

A beating heart makes for a formidable surgical arena, but a new robotic catheter could someday equip surgeons to operate in the cardiac environment with greater ease.

A Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering research team is conducting the first phase 1 clinical trial of a magnetic, flexible endoscope that has the potential to provide a safer alternative to standard colonoscopy, particularly for individuals with inflammatory bowel disease. Source: Nashville Medical News

NIBIB-funded researchers are developing an autonomous robot that can perform bowel surgery with minimal assistance from a surgeon. In preclinical models, the robot outperformed expert surgeons when compared head-to-head.

In a high-tech lab on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus in Baltimore, engineers have been building a robot that may be able to stitch back together the broken vessels in your belly and at some point maybe your brain, no doctor needed. Source: The Baltimore Sun

A robot has performed laparoscopic surgery on the soft tissue of a pig without the guiding hand of a human—a significant step toward fully automated surgery on humans. Designed by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers, the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR. Source: ed today in Science Robotics.

A new technique funded by NIBIB and developed by University of Minnesota researchers allows 3D printing of hydrogel-based sensors directly on the surface of organs, such as lungs—even as they expand and contract. The technology was developed to support robot-assisted medical treatments.

A new $2.3 million grant from the NIBIB at NIH will support a research effort led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to make a virtual surgery scenario – and others like it – a reality.

Read more at Mirage News.

A team at ClearCam, Inc., with funding from the NIBIB and ties to the University of Texas at Austin, designed a device for wiping a laparoscope lens clean, much the same way that a wiper blade clears a fogged up window.

A new deep learning technique constructs better macroscopic medical images of cells and tissues at ultra-fast speeds.