MagnetoSuture: Tetherless Manipulation of Suture Needles

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of ligation and tissue penetration for surgical suturing tasks using magnetically actuated suture needles. Manipulation of suture needles in minimally invasive surgery involves using articulated manual/robotic tools for needle steering and controlling needle-tissue or thread-tissue interactions. The large footprints of conventional articulated surgical tools significantly increase surgical invasiveness, potentially leading to longer recovery times, tissue damage, scarring, or associated infections. Aiming to address these issues, we investigate the feasibility of using magnetic fields to tetherlessly steer suture needles. The primary challenge of such a concept is to provide sufficient force for tissue penetration and ligation. In this work, *

Magnetically Assisted Robotic Fetal Surgery for the Treatment of Spina Bifida

“…Suturing remains challenging using magnetic guidance, with only one example demonstrating this under magnetic steering [26]. The constraints of in utero procedures render their method impractical for our application.…”

Going Hands-Free: MagnetoSuture™ for Untethered Guided Needle Penetration of Human Tissue Ex Vivo

“…We previously described MagnetoSuture™ efforts using magnetic gradient pulling applied to three different needles. Our initial work used a sharpened cylindrical NdFeB magnet ≈25.4 mm long and 1.6 mm in diameter [9,31]. Improving upon that simple design, Pryor et al manipulated a 22 G hypodermic stainless steel needle (0.413 mm inner diameter, 0.7176 mm outer diameter, 23.5 mm length) with embedded NdFeB magnets (0.3 mm diameter, 0.5 mm length, 42 inserted magnets, axially magnetized), demonstrating the ability to find and track the needle in highly occluded environments [32].…”

“…Naturally, care must be taken to ensure the environment is free of magnetic materials not involved in the surgical procedure so as to avoid the inadvertent motion of magnetic objects by the applied magnetic fields. Recently, magnetically actuated robots, ranging from sizes on the order of 10 nanometers to a centimeter, have been developed for medical applications, including drug delivery [6], biofilm removal [7], biopsy [8], ligation [9], catheter guidance [10][11][12], tissue penetration [13], cutting [14], shape programming [15], and needle advancing and steering [16]. At the milli-and centimeter scale, devices and manipulation platforms for performing surgical procedures are being developed which make use of different actuation methods, manipulating a broad range of functional robotic devices [17].…”

“…Here, using a magnetic system similar to that used in our previous work [9,31,32], we demonstrate the manipulation of a standard suture needle with an attached suture thread using an array of up to five electromagnets. While our previous works in this field utilize a larger system with a workspace of 100 mm on a side, the system presented here fits a Petri dish only 35 mm in diameter.…”

2020 Index IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics Vol. 2

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