Mapquest for Surgeons

I love using mapquest. It takes all of the improvisation out of driving instructions (leaving my driveway: start out on smith avenue going northeast. Turn right after <.1 miles). You got your right/left directions, your compass directions, and the names of the actual routes. Even maps for each leg of the trip, for those who need it.

It would probably be good if we had mapquest for other things in life, too. Like job hunting – wouldn’t it be easier if instead of trying to make connections and angle our resumes, we could just mapquest our way to our next job and get a list of exactly what to do to get there? High school students could just mapquest their way into their college of choice. You could mapquest your relationships, too (say ‘I love you’ at 4 months, six days. U-turn at words ‘we need to talk’).

Ok, so maybe we’re not there yet. But mapquest has advanced beyond the realm of travel. At least if you’re talking about roads. Professor Moshe Shoham of the Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, has developed a robot called SmartAssist, which navigates itself within the body, directing surgeons to the site at which they need to operate, via the shortest possible route. Sound familiar? Trust me, you won’t find this by going to mapquest.com and clicking on ‘outside the US and Canada’.

While SmartAssist is now being used in several major Israeli and American hospitals for back surgery, Shoham and the Technion have plowed on – their latest breakthrough (as of yet undeveloped) is the technology to create a tiny swimming robot that will be able to navigate its own way through your spinal fluid, a camera mounted on its head, able to detect whatever problems your doctor instructs it to investigate (you can read about this in our previous post ‘Mico-Penetrating Robots’).

Shoham was quoted as saying “I believe that in the future there will be micro-robots that will be permanently implanted in our bodies and will be able to navigate to problematic points. This is a step up for micro-penetration into the human body.”

You have to admit that it’s very cool. But is anyone else thinking of the ‘bug’ from Neo’s stomach in The Matrix?

Read more at Israel21c.org

Like

Unlike