UNC-Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University have built a flexible, robust robot to explore deep lung tissue, addressing obstacles in lung cancer surgery. Ron Alterovitz, PhD, and Jason Akulian, MD MPH, proved the robot's autonomous capacity to navigate a live laboratory model while avoiding important structures in a recent Science Robotics study.

“This technology allows us to reach targets we can’t otherwise reach with a standard or even robotic bronchoscope,” said Dr. Akulian, co-author on the paper and Section Chief of Interventional Pulmonology and Pulmonary Oncology in the UNC Division of Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care Medicine. “It gives you that extra few centimeters or few millimeters even, which would help immensely with pursuing small targets in the lungs.”

UNC’s collaborative effort combined medical, computer science, and engineering expertise to create the autonomous steerable needle robot.

Yueh Z. Lee, MD, PhD, of UNC's Department of Radiology, Robert J. Webster III of Vanderbilt University, and Alan Kuntz of the University of Utah were part of the team.

A mechanically controlled needle with a flexible nickel-titanium alloy design, laser-etched for improved flexibility, is one of the robot's components. It creates 3D lung models using CT scans and AI, allowing it to travel and execute treatments like lung biopsies while autonomously avoiding important tissues.

“The autonomous steerable needle we’ve developed is highly compact, but the system is packed with a suite of technologies that allow the needle to navigate autonomously in real-time,” said Alterovitz, the principal investigator on the project and senior author on the paper. “It’s akin to a self-driving car, but it navigates through lung tissue, avoiding obstacles like significant blood vessels as it travels to its destination.”

The needle accommodates lung movement during breathing, a unique challenge. In tests with a breathing laboratory model, the robot advances during breath holds, akin to hitting a moving target, according to Akulian.

“There remain some nuances in terms of the robot’s ability to acquire targets and then actually get to them effectively,” said Akulian, who is also a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, “and while there’s still a lot of work to be done, I’m very excited about continuing to push the boundaries of what we can do for patients with the world-class experts that are here."

“We plan to continue creating new autonomous medical robots that combine the strengths of robotics and AI to improve medical outcomes for patients facing a variety of health challenges while providing guarantees on patient safety,” added Alterovitz.