2024-02-18 00:23:46
On January 30, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Among its payload was a small metal box the size of a microwave, discreet in appearance but with the potential to revolutionize medicine as we know it. Its destination was the International Space Station (ISS), where its launch coincided with the presence of the astronauts of the Ax-3 mission, commanded by the Spanish Michael López-Alegría.
It was NASA astronaut and flight engineer Loral O’Hara who was in charge of removing the packaging foam from the box and checking its connections. Inside the receptacle awaited spaceMIRA, a robotic arm specially adapted to carry out remote surgery from Earth for the first time. Its operators were six American doctors, meeting at the headquarters of the Virtual Incision company in Lincoln (Nebraska), thanks to mission control from NASA’s Payload Operations Center at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
This pioneering experiment opens up endless possibilities, and not only in space missions, destined to be increasingly longer and more distant. “The success of spaceMIRA in a space station orbiting more than 400 km above Earth indicates how useful it can be for health centers on land,” said Shane Farritor.professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, development director of spaceMIRA and co-founder of Virtual Incision.
Miniature surgical robot
For years now, Doctors around the world frequently operate highly precise robotic arms, also remotely. However, they are usually large devices, so their use is limited and it is difficult for countries or regions with low resources to access them. This circumstance also affects space missions and environments as small as the ISS.
That is why those responsible for Virtual Incision have two decades working on reducing the size of these devices and expand the possibilities of using them remotely. Thus the space version of MIRA or “miniature in vivo robotic assistant” was born. This is made up of a central body from which two small flexible arms emerge ending in their respective metal clamps, which rotate 360 degrees and serve as the precise fingers of this artificial surgeon.
An ISS astronaut extracts the small metal box in which she traveled spaceMIRA NASA Omicrono
From the body, between the two extremities, an endoscopic recording system is born: a cable with a camera and LED light that transmits the operation to the control center. It is designed so that, miles away, specialists in the field can perform the surgery with another machine. A screen allows them to see the process in detail, while the two joysticks with buttons are the extension of the robot’s grippers, along with foot-operated pedals.
SpaceMIRA, the version present on the ISS, has pre-programmed and remote surgical operation modes, thanks to its robotic arm regarding 76 cm long and weighing less than 1 kg. For two hours, doctors were able to test some of its functions, such as grab and cut 10 elastic bands of different thicknesses that acted as human tissues: The thinnest samples resembled skin, while the densest ones emulated organs such as the liver.
A surgeon operating spaceMIRA from Earth Virtual Incision / University of Nebraska-Lincoln Omicrono
Throughout the tests, operators made up to 20 cuts on the front and back of the belts, taking advantage of the possibilities offered by the robotic fingers. They also had to vthey are with great care the precision of the movements, since in any slip the arm might hit the external box, break and distribute its pieces throughout the space station.
The main difference with respect to other tests carried out remotely had to do with microgravity and with the latency factor, which was quantified between 0.5 and 0.75 seconds. This implied a delay in each gesture of the doctors, who had to compensate for it in different ways. Thus they verified that larger movements on Earth translated into smaller movements aboard the ISS.
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“You have to wait a bit for the movement to occur“They are definitely slower movements than what you are used to in the operating room,” said Michael Jobst, a Lincoln colorectal surgeon. He already had experience with MIRA, having previously successfully removed part of a patient’s colon using the arm. Virtual Incision robotic.
Danger in space
When an astronaut aboard the ISS has a medical emergency, he or she has a rescue capsule to return to Earth in less than six hours, a margin of time that is sometimes not available. With our sights set on future missions to the Moon and Mars, where astronauts will live for months or years, the need for a surgeon robot that can operate is imperative.
The MIRA remote surgery robot
NASA has financially supported the project and actively participated in the test, which is of vital importance for the future of space exploration. In a news release, the agency noted that with longer, more ambitious space missions, such as those planned with Artemis, “the potential need for urgent care increases, including surgical procedures ranging from simple suturing of lacerations to more complex activities“.
In a previous experiment, former NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson took control of the robot’s controls while it was at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Meanwhile, MIRA was more than 1,400 kilometers away in an operating room at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. Tasks similar to those of surgery were performed, demonstrating the usefulness of this robot both in space and in hospitals around the world.
MIRA, Virtual Incision Omicrono Omicrono surgeon robot
MIRA might be of great help in military operations far from bases and well-equipped medical centers. One more example of the trend that is driving the union between medicine and robotics, with inventions to solve serious ailments far from an operating room and without specialists who can treat the patient.
The machines, autonomously or with some telematic support, are responsible for the intervention at the moment, preventing the patient from dying in a complicated transfer. As has always happened with most human inventions for space exploration, MIRA can also be useful on this planet and in hospitals where robots and healthcare workers already work side by side.
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