Novel Therapy

Provide a safer, faster, and more painless therapy experience.

Revolutionizing Aneurysm Treatment with Smart Robotic Technology

About the Intelligent Microrobots for Advanced Therapy

This work aims to develop a microrobotic platform integrating simulation, preoperative evaluation, and real-time operation processes. By introducing microrobots to biomedicine area, we pursue a new method for minimally invasive interventions.
Microrobotic Swarms

Rationale

Conventional therapeutic methods are facing challenges with the development of time. Drug therapy relies on human circulation, which may lack efficiency; furthermore, interventional therapy could cause severe damage and pain to patients. Therefore, it is of great value to explore a new direction to realize more targeted and efficient medical method. 

Controllable active matters at micro/nanoscale possess the potential to undertake practical biomedical tasks addressing the above challenges. These micro/nanorobots could access to narrow and tortuous environments in human bodies (e.g., GI tracts and vasculars); high controllability enables targeted delivery and therapy; machine learning algorithms could endow the micro/nanorobots with advanced autonomy to adapt various working environments.

Objective

Objective 1

Apply machine learning algorithms to achieve autonomous, environmental adaptive navigation of microswarms against various dynamic disturbances

Objective 2

Achieve automated navigation and treatment in physiological environments (e.g., GI tracts and vasculars) assisted by medical imaging modalities.

Objective 3

Develop a virtual surgical platform integrating the pre-operative planning, clinical training, and real-time operation of micro/nanorobots-assisted therapy.

Significance

The outcomes of the project, the artificial intelligence-assisted microswarm navigation and treatment, and the virtual microrobotic platform could benefit both clinical surgeons and patients needing interventions. The more convenient, intelligent, and minimally invasive therapy method can not only improve the treatment efficiency, but also ease the patient’s suffering.

Impact

The outcomes of this project could promote the development of control science, materials, and the application of machine learning. The targeted and minimally invasive treatment utilizing micro/nanorobots could reveal a new direction for modern medicine.

Publication

  1. Yang, L., Jiang, J., Gao, X., Wang, Q., Dou, Q., & Zhang, L. (2022). Autonomous environment-adaptive microrobot swarm navigation enabled by deep learning-based real-time distribution planning. Nature Machine Intelligence, 4(5), 480-493. 
  2. Jiang, J., Yang, L., Hao, B., Xu, T., Wu, X., & Zhang, L. (2024). Automated Microrobotic Manipulation using Reconfigurable Magnetic Microswarms. IEEE Transactions on Robotics. 
  3. Yang, L., Jiang, J., Ji, F., Li, Y., Yung, K. L., Ferreira, A., & Zhang, L. (2024). Machine learning for micro-and nanorobots. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1-14.