Big leaps made to make space surgery possible
Earlier this month, the three-inch, two-pound surgery robot spaceMIRA—standing for Miniaturized in Vivo Robotic Assistant—was jettisoned off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. From there, it was sent to a space station that sits approximately 250 miles above Lincoln, Nebraska, where surgeons would begin the first simulated procedure using the device in a zero-gravity environment.
The surgical robot was designed by researchers at the University of Lincoln-Nebraska. After the first proper round of testing, its project members appear excited about the results. In an article for CNN, cofounder and chief technology officer at the startup that created spaceMIRA and Virtual Incision, Shane Farritor, revels in what this could mean. One of the notable possibilities is being able to have those at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spend longer time in space, “‘The long-duration spaceflight will place new demands on medical care in a lot of ways…We just wanted to show what’s possible, and we think it’s a really good step in the right direction.’”
It may be important to note that while this early success is promising, there are still complications that surgeons who hope to use the machine will have to navigate— even beyond the adaptation to a low-to-no-gravity environment. One that is most pertinent in testing surgeons' minds is the lag from real-time to the robot’s cameras that signal to the surgeon their actions as they perform their surgeries. As of right now, this delay is estimated to range between two-thirds and three-fourths of a second. While this, when applied to different occasions, may seem like a minute issue, when the context is that of medical care, those few extra moments can have a substantial impact on the success of real surgeries.
In the same aforementioned article with CNN, Dr. Michael Jobst, a colorectal surgeon who aided in the simulated procedure and who has used spaceMIRA in 15 previous surgeries on Earth confides that, “‘…it’s my job to stop that bleeding immediately. But to have an 800 to 850-millisecond lag between seeing the blood loss and then doing something about it…’” He expands upon this point later on in the article, adding, “‘Five seconds would be an eternity in surgery, and a split second or a half a second is going to be significant. So, this [adjusting to the time delay] was a big challenge.’”
With this challenge in mind, the surgeons on the ground in Nebraska still managed to pull off this simulated procedure successfully. SpaceMIRA is scheduled to return to Earth from the International Space Station in the spring of this year.
Farritor is hopeful for the future of spaceMIRA as his team and the researchers at the University of Lincoln-Nebraska continue to fine-tune and test the robot. While the galactic implications of the robot's most recent success are certainly significant, Farritor is also preoccupied with how spaceMIRA might be able to help people within Earth’s atmosphere, as well. He hopes that when spaceMIRA is put on the market, it will be able to connect surgeons with patients in need around the globe. The prospect of giving access to quality medical care in regions of the world where the need is high is a goal with the possibility to shift the medical field in grand and ever-growing ways.
Thumbnail Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons