Engineer builds robot based on crab to remove stomach cancers
Thursday, February 2, 2012 - 09:01
in Health & Medicine
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a bit of science that has a genuine wow factor, doctors and a mechanical engineer from Singapore's National University Hospital and Nanyang Technological Institute have teamed together to build a small remotely controlled robot that can be fed down a patient’s throat and into the gut to remove cancerous tumors. Enterologist Lawrence Ho and engineer Louis Phee designed and built the robot after having lunch with renowned surgeon Sydney Chung (he was on the front lines of the SARS epidemic) who suggested that perhaps such a robot could be made that would mimic the crab they were eating, allowing surgeons to remove tumors from cancer patients without having to resort to cutting them open.