Surgical Robot Passes Space Test With Flying Colors

In a test that involved half a dozen surgeons from across the United States, a tiny robot built at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln successfully completed the procedure. Surgery Simulation aboard the International Space Station.

Shane Ferriter, Nebraska engineering professor and co-founder of Virtual Incision, watches as Dr. Michael Jobst, a colorectal surgery specialist at Lincoln, builds the first surgical robotic kit on the International Space Station. Using controls in virtual incision offices in Lincoln, surgeons cut rubber bands — simulating surgery inside a payload box on the space station. Image credit: Craig Chandler | University Communication and Marketing

“Tell the astronauts they have six extra surgeons today,” said Yuman Fong, a liver surgeon at the City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles, as he showed a Houston surgeon using hand and foot controls from the console. Seen guiding the robot while doing. Lincoln headquarters of Virtual Chira, a private company created to develop the MIRA robot.

“If they ever need us in the future, it will take us less than a second to get there.”

MIRA — which stands for Miniaturized In Vivo Robotic Assistant — was developed under the leadership of UNL’s Shane Frater, Leder Professor of Engineering and co-founder of Virtual Incision. It is the world’s only small form factor robotic assisted surgery device. The Nebraska research team leveraged MIRA’s unique design to create SpaceMIRA, an iteration that allows for pre-programmed as well as long-distance remote surgery operation methods.

“SpaceMIRA’s success on a space station orbiting 250 miles above Earth demonstrates how useful it can be for healthcare facilities on Earth,” Farritor said.

Forreter and doctoral student Rachel Wagner received grant funding through NASA Nebraska’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCOR) to send a robot to the International Space Station. The robot took off on January 30 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida aboard a SpaceX rocket carrying a Northrop Grumman cargo vehicle.

Astronaut and flight engineer Laurel O’Hara pulled the SpaceMIRA box to check the connections, opened it to remove the packing foam, and resealed it. Image credit: NASA

It is the first surgical robot aboard the space station and one of the first remote surgery operations to be tested in space.

Wagner, who is pursuing a doctorate in biomedical engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, spoke with NASA’s Payload Operations Center at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, during simulated surgery on Feb. served as control. Later, she briefly took control of the robot, as surgeons hailed her as the first woman to operate SpaceMIRA in space.

SpaceMIRA, which is about 30 inches tall and weighs about 2 pounds, performed its maneuvers inside an experimental locker the size of a microwave oven. The cylindrical device, which looks a bit like an oversized stick blender, is topped with two arms – the grasper on the left, the scissors on the right. An integrated, articulated camera enables the operator to see the robot in action.

During the surgical demonstration, the signal delay for action by the robot aboard the space station to the control center ranged from two-thirds to three-quarters of a second.

To compensate for the lag, engineers experimented with different scale factors for the ground-based controls, so that larger movements on the ground resulted in smaller robot movements.

“You have to wait a little bit for the movement to happen, it’s definitely a slower movement than what you’re used to in the operating room,” said Michael Jobst, a colorectal surgeon based in Lincoln. .

Jobst has participated in 15 previous procedures with MIRA, including its use in a 2021 clinical study to remove part of a patient’s colon during a procedure at Bryan LGH Medical Center in Lincoln. included. Locker

Several surgeons said they were surprised that spaceMIRA could work in space. But it’s the robots’ potential utility on Earth that really excites them.

“This is a huge leap forward for surgery,” said Ted Voloyiannis of Texas Oncology in Houston. Voloyiannis has performed more than 1,000 robotic-assisted surgeries over the past 15 years. But the surgical robots commonly used today are much larger. , which take up an entire room.

“This robot is more accessible,” he said. “It’s easy to train on and it will be available to smaller communities without specialized surgeons.”

Source: University of Nebraska-Lincoln