Robotic burrowing in brain parenchyma tissue

Abstract Several brain pathologies could take advantage of local delivery of drugs or electrical stimulation for the treatment of tumors or neurological disorders. A self propelling microdevice could reach remote locations and is available for further precision positioning in time, also after months. In this paper we present a study for the locomotion of such a micro-device. The proposed device is built of piezoelectric actuators that create an undulating motion which is capable of propelling the micro-robot in the brain parenchyma. In order to estimate the feasibility of such device we measured the resonant frequencies of an up-scaled actuator in air and brain tissue mimicking gel and found that it can actually burrow into the tissue. An optimally designed actuator is able to produce a maximal propulsive velocity of 25 mm/s and propulsive force of 8.7 mN. Relying on a realistic power consumption of 10 mW will reduce the performance to 1 mm/s and 0.34 mN.

[1]  Pierre E. Dupont,et al.  Fast needle insertion to minimize tissue deformation and damage , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[2]  Sherwin E. Hua,et al.  Deep Brain Stimulation: An Evolving Technology , 2008, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[3]  Duane S. Cronin,et al.  Mechanical Properties of Ballistic Gelatin at High Deformation Rates , 2009 .

[4]  Bradley J. Nelson,et al.  Modeling and Control of Untethered Biomicrorobots in a Fluidic Environment Using Electromagnetic Fields , 2006, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[5]  J. Gray,et al.  The Propulsion of Sea-Urchin Spermatozoa , 1955 .

[6]  Eric Lauga,et al.  Propulsion in a viscoelastic fluid , 2007 .

[7]  D. Katz,et al.  Swimming of spermatozoa in a linear viscoelastic fluid. , 1998, Biorheology.

[8]  N. Cohen,et al.  Swimming at low Reynolds number: a beginners guide to undulatory locomotion , 2010 .

[9]  Shuxiang Guo,et al.  Underwater Swimming Micro Robot Using IPMC Actuator , 2006, 2006 International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation.

[10]  Dieter Klatt,et al.  The impact of aging and gender on brain viscoelasticity , 2009, NeuroImage.

[11]  L Frasson,et al.  STING: a soft-tissue intervention and neurosurgical guide to access deep brain lesions through curved trajectories , 2010, Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Part H, Journal of engineering in medicine.

[12]  K. I. Arai,et al.  Swimming micro-machine driven by magnetic torque , 2001 .

[13]  J. van Dommelen,et al.  The influence of test conditions on characterization of the mechanical properties of brain tissue. , 2008, Journal of biomechanical engineering.

[14]  Moshe Shoham,et al.  Propulsion Method for Swimming Microrobots , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[15]  Christos Bergeles,et al.  Characterizing the swimming properties of artificial bacterial flagella. , 2009, Nano letters.