From Gaussian by tumor

DailyTechInfo based on IEEE Spectrum: Self-Assembling Robotic Gun Will Shoot Through Tissue Inside Your BodyCurrently, quite a lot of attention is paid to the development of various micro- and nanorobots for medical purposes.

And in the near future, there will still come a time when any disease or any defect that has arisen in the human body will be "corrected" by an army of microscopic mechanisms that are in the human blood and are waiting there for their "finest hour". Another step towards this fantastic goal was the work of researchers from the University of Houston and Boston Children's Hospital, who developed and demonstrated the performance of tiny robots that can "assemble" into a miniature Gauss gun and shoot, hitting a malignant cell or delivering it into its bowels necessary medications.

The Gauss gun, or, as it is also called, the rail gun, is a kind of magnetic accelerator that, with the help of the sequential operation of several electric magnets, accelerates the projectile to a high speed. Unfortunately, neither coils of electromagnets nor an energy source sufficient for their operation can be introduced into the design of a tiny micro robot. Therefore, scientists used the energy of strong magnets of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) unit to activate the micro-robot guns.

With the help of an external magnetic field, each part of the future "Gauss gun" is brought to a given position and connected to other parts. The last module connected to the gun, which acts as a trigger mechanism, which forces the gun to make a shot. The use of MRI will allow you to observe and monitor this process in real time and remove unnecessary parts of the "shot" cannon from the body.

The technology developed by scientists is still far from the level of miniaturization, which will allow the use of micropushers directly inside the patient's body. But the demonstration of the technology's performance, which can be seen in the video below, is quite impressive and effective.

The magnets used in the construction of the "Gauss gun" are made of iron, which in a strong magnetic field from the MRI installation acts no worse than niodymium magnets. The projectile fired by the cannon can be a tiny ball, inside of which there is a "charge" of a drug, or a sharp needle with a high penetration capacity for guaranteed damage to the membranes of diseased tissue cells or breaking blood clots that clog blood vessels.

The next steps that scientists are going to take will be to optimize the system for conducting its clinical trials, which implies a sufficiently strong minimization of its size. In addition, new methods will be developed to control the movement of parts of micro-robots to their destination, which will allow "firing from miniature Gauss guns" with higher accuracy.

Currently, scientists still do not know the time it may take to turn this technology into a technology that can be used in practice. But in any case, you are now seeing one of the rather large and important steps taken towards the development of medical micro-robotics.

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13.07.2015