'Fantastic Voyage' not so fantastic any more?

How many of you remember the 1966 film 'Fantastic Voyage'?




Those who don't know it can read more at the link. Briefly, it involved technology to miniaturize a submarine and its crew to perform a life-saving operation by 'swimming' through human blood vessels into the brain of the patient.

It now appears that science may be getting close to this previously 'fantastic' idea.

More than 40 years on, the concept of a microscopic ‘submarine’ that can swim through narrow blood vessels and help save a patient’s life has moved closer to reality.

Scientists have designed one of the world’s tiniest motors, just a quarter of a millimetre wide, which they believe will be powerful enough to drive a tiny robot around the body and even into the delicate structures of the brains of stroke victims.
graphic

Equipped with a camera, the remote-controlled device could send vital pictures back to the surgeon, remove body tissue for a biopsy or deliver drugs to where they are needed most.

In Fantastic Voyage a submarine called Proteus was miniaturised, complete with its crew of doctors, and injected into a man’s bloodstream to remove a clot in his brain.

The designers behind the new motor, which is less than the width of two human hairs, have named their creation Proteus in a nod to the Oscar-winning film made in 1966.

So far it has succeeded in swimming through human blood in the laboratory, but scientists hope it could also power its way up the narrow arteries of the brain.

Strong enough to swim against the blood’s flow, the micro motor harnesses piezoelectricity – the same kind of energy used in gas lighters.

Instead of using a propeller, it has a tail less than a millimetre long which swishes thousands of times a second in a motion modelled on the food poisoning bug E coli which uses a tail, or flagella, to move about.

In conventional keyhole surgery, catheter tubes inserted into the body can cause serious, and even fatal, damage if they puncture narrow arteries.

But the new motor could easily guide cameras, drugs and needles through the narrowest arteries, according to the researchers from Melbourne’s Monash University who developed it.

Professor James Friend said of his invention: ‘It is less fragile, simpler to control and approximately 70 per cent smaller than the smallest design produced so far.

‘Our hope is that it can be used to save people’s lives because it will be able to reach parts of the body that surgeons cannot currently reach.

Here's a video showing the concept.

Fascinating! I wonder what they're going to come up with next?

Peter