The RAM department has been researching the use of untethered magnetic robots for minimally invasive treatments within the body, such as for removing blood clots found in blood vessels. The microrobots have shown a lot of promise for treatments such as aneurysms that require them to travel within the blood vessels, however, an area that has not been explored much is their potential usage in treatments that do not have easy access to blood vessels, such as the liver for liver cancer. This requires the microrobots to travel instead through the soft tissue of the liver. Therefore, research needs to be done if it can also travel effectively through soft tissue. This is an issue of medical significance and can contribute to the wider medical landscape as these microrobots can be used for delivering a payload for medical treatments, making treatments for different medical conditions potentially more efficient, with a higher success rate and resulting in fewer complications when compared to current methods.
The goal is to be able to characterise how the untethered magnetic robot behaves when travelling in a gelatin block that mimics the soft tissue found in the liver. This is done to find out if they can be used for liver cancer treatment. The primary characteristics to be investigated are the torsion, curvature and trajectory of the untethered magnetic robot.
Another goal is to be able to find a gelatin block that can mimic the soft tissue of the liver in order to carry out this research.