Surgical robot provides minimally invasive option for brain procedure

A surgical procedure to treat severe epilepsy involves drilling through the skull deep into the brain to destroy the small area where seizures originate.

Engineers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville considered whether it were possible to perform the operation in a less invasive way and decided that it was because the area of the brain involved is the hippocampus, a region in the bottom of the brain.

Their solution was to develop a robotic device that pushes through the cheek and enters the brain from underneath, which avoids having to drill through the skull and is much closer to the target area.

To do so meant developing a shape-memory alloy needle that can be precisely steered along a curving path and a robotic platform that can operate inside the magnetic field created by an MRI scanner.

The engineers have developed a working prototype, which was unveiled in a live demonstration at the Fluid Power Innovation and Research Conference in Nashville by David Comber, the graduate student in mechanical engineering who did much of the design work.