{"id":146317,"date":"2023-11-09T09:49:51","date_gmt":"2023-11-09T14:49:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=146317"},"modified":"2024-01-26T11:48:07","modified_gmt":"2024-01-26T16:48:07","slug":"breathe-easier-while-steering-from-afar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2023\/11\/09\/breathe-easier-while-steering-from-afar\/","title":{"rendered":"Breathe Easier While Steering From Afar"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Sheila Russo’s lab, a soft robotic tool to help detect lung cancer early, when it’s most curable<\/strong><\/h3>\n

By Patrick L. Kennedy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Imagine standing outside a hedge maze and shoving a garden hose into it. Now, holding one end of the hose in your hands, you\u2019re trying to maneuver the other end of the hose in order to hook an unseen ribbon that\u2019s stuck on a little branch deep within the shrubbery. Oh, and even though you know roughly where the ribbon is, a strong gust of wind periodically blows through the bushes, moving all the branches out of place.<\/p>\n

If you can see how the physics are against you here, then you understand the task facing pulmonologists as they seek a biopsy of a lung cancer nodule using a conventional bronchoscope, says Assistant Professor Sheila Russo<\/a> (ME<\/a>, MSE).<\/p>\n

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Sheila Russo (ME, MSE). Photo by Dana J. Quigley<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMeanwhile, people continue to die,\u201d Russo says. \u201cThis is what keeps me and my colleagues motivated to come into the lab in the morning. We\u2019re engineering soft robotic solutions to this societal problem in healthcare.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lung cancer is the deadliest form of cancer worldwide, partly due to the difficulty in catching the disease at its earliest stage, when it is most curable, says Russo. The lungs are a complex pair of organs, with the trachea branching out into a maze of smaller and smaller airways and ducts. Most cancerous lesions develop in those tiny ducts, way out in the periphery of the lung.<\/p>\n

The location of a possible tumor nodule might be identified by a CT scan, but in order to extract a biopsy, a clinician needs to thread a bronchoscope into the lung\u2019s periphery, find the tumor and puncture it, as in the Sisyphean scenario with the hose conjured above. Meanwhile, the patient\u2019s breathing motion makes the nodule a moving target. As a result, lung tissue might be punctured in the wrong place, and patients will go home unclear that they even have a tumor.<\/p>\n

Russo has a solution. With an interdisciplinary team combining expertise in mechanical engineering, materials science and engineering, biomedical engineering, and clinical medicine, she has developed a soft-robotic-assisted bronchoscope. With remote control, a pulmonologist can steer the business end of the scope and deploy the needle with accuracy from outside the patient. Published last year in Soft Robotics<\/a>, <\/em>the innovation recently earned Russo’s lab a prestigious National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Project Grant<\/a> (also known as an R01).<\/p>\n

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Made of soft materials, Russo’s bronchoscope can rotate more than 180 degrees and curl back on itself, allowing for more nimble navigation in the lung’s periphery.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Whereas a traditional bronchoscope is six millimeters in diameter and has only 120 degrees of rotation, the Russo team\u2019s robotic scope has a diameter of 2.4 millimeters and can rotate more than 180 degrees. Embedded with a camera as well as a needle, the device moves by means of three independent fluid pressure-driven actuators and uses a kind of airbag to stabilize itself in the moving airways, a bit like a subway rider grabbing a handrail. The device is made of soft materials that allow the tip to curl back onto itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis allows you to navigate into very complex configurations within the lungs in very deep locations,\u201d says Russo. \u201cIt\u2019s a more precise, more accurate approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russo and her collaborators<\/a> were able to miniaturize the scope by using new materials and even new fabrication processes to produce the robot. \u201cWe had to start from scratch and develop novel manufacturing technologies that enable us to scale these devices down as much as possible,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n

Key to the development of the device has been the input of pulmonology experts such as Assistant Professor Ehab Billatos of the BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor us as robotics-assistant engineers,\u201d says Russo, \u201cwe definitely want to have clinicians on the team who can tell us, \u2018On a daily basis, this is my struggle. Can you engineer a robotic solution that can make my job easier, and at the end of the day, improve the health of my patients?\u2019 So, we\u2019re working at the interface between pulmonology, manufacturing, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, controls, and software engineering. There\u2019s really a variety of different skills that have to come together to be able to successfully work on this research.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, as the team further develops the technology with the NIH R01 grant, Russo hopes to simplify the control of the device with semiautomatic navigation, making it as easy as possible to train surgeons in its use.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd that means you can bring good quality healthcare to remote areas,\u201d says Russo. \u201cWe\u2019re lucky here in Boston\u2014we have the best hospitals. But I come from a very small rural town, and probably the best hospital my family and friends have is about two hours away. Imagine putting technology like this into the hands of clinicians there and in other areas in the country and the world, so everyone can have access to that level of high-quality healthcare that we all need.\u201d<\/p>\n

Image at top: Second Bay Studios. <\/coverpara>From: McCandless, M., Perry, A., DiFilippo, N., Carroll, A., Billatos, E. and Russo, S., 2021, “A Soft Robot for Peripheral Lung Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy,” <\/coverpara><\/em>Soft Robotics<\/coverpara>.<\/coverpara><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Sheila Russo’s lab, a soft robotic tool to help detect lung cancer early, when it’s most curable By Patrick L. Kennedy Imagine standing outside a hedge maze and shoving a garden hose into it. Now, holding one end of the hose in your hands, you\u2019re trying to maneuver the other end of the hose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,257,1036],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146317"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146317"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":146320,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146317\/revisions\/146320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}