Successful instrument guidance through deep and convulted blood vessel networks

A team led by Professor Sylvain Martel at the Polytechnique Montréal Nanorobotics Laboratory has developed a novel approach to tackling one of the biggest challenges of endovascular surgery: how to reach the most difficult-to-access physiological locations. Their solution is a robotic platform that uses the fringe field generated by the superconducting magnet of a clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to guide medical instruments through deeper and more complex vascular structures. The approach has been successfully demonstrated in-vivo, and is the subject of an article just published in Science Robotics.