New generation ultrasonic devices could revolutionise surgery

Researchers funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, are developing a tiny ultrasonic device that could be integrated into a flexible surgical robot to perform surgical procedures deep inside the human body. Some surgery already makes use of ultrasonic devices, however this is often only possible when it is easy to get to the operating site.

The researchers, led by Professor Margaret Lucas of Glasgow University, have been looking at how they can adapt flextensional transducers which can create sufficient vibration so the surgical tip does not need to be in resonance with it, hence giving them the ability to miniaturise the device. The adapted transducer could then be attached to a robot with flexible arms that can reach any part of the body, and deliver the precise quantity of ultrasonic energy to the exact part of the body that requires the surgery.

Ms Lucas said: “If you are trying to penetrate bone, for instance, [with traditional surgical tools] it requires quite a large force, whereas with ultrasonics it requires almost no force. Ultrasonics can also be tissue-selective, so if you have the surgical tip operating at the right frequency and vibration amplitude, it will cut through one material, but will stop when it hits another type of material. Once you decide what frequency you will be operating at, that determines what the size of the transducer has to be, and it also dictates to some extent what size your surgical tip has to be, and that can be a big restriction. So you would have a tentacle-like robot with an ultrasonic surgical device on the end of it, and you could bring that into the human body along quite tortuous pathways to the site of surgery, and then the ultrasonic device would be activated to perform the surgical procedure. “