Intelligent US capsule robots on the horizon

The recent publication in Science Robotics: Intelligent magnetic manipulation for gastrointestinal ultrasound by Joseph C. Norton et al. reveals some great new benefits these devices will offer to the clinicians very soon.

"Diagnostic endoscopy in the gastrointestinal tract has remained largely unchanged for decades and is limited tothe visualization of the tissue surface, the collection of biopsy samples for diagnoses, and minor interventionssuch as clipping or tissue removal. In this work, we present the autonomous servoing of a magnetic capsulerobot for in situ, subsurface diagnostics of microanatomy. We investigated and showed the feasibility of closed-loop magnetic control using digitized microultrasound (mUS) feedback; this is crucial for obtaining robust im-aging in an unknown and unconstrained environment. We demonstrated the functionality of an autonomousservoing algorithm that usesmUS feedback, both on benchtop trials and in vivo in a porcine model. We havevalidated this magneticmUS servoing in instances of autonomous linear probe motion and were able to locatemarkers in an agar phantom with 1.0 ± 0.9 mm position accuracy using a fusion of robot localization andmUSimage information. This work demonstrates the feasibility of closed-loop roboticmUS imaging in the bowelwithout the need for either a rigid physical link between the transducer and extracorporeal tools or complexmanual manipulation

Source: Science Robotics