R2D2,The Tiny Robots Modernising Eye Surgery

Robots that are capable of making precise operations inside the human eye will make it possible to perform entirely new procedures.

These RD2D robot helps surgeons make very small incisions and other movements inside the human eye.

Last September, Robert MacLaren, an ophthalmologist and professor at Oxford University, plunged a tiny robotic arm into William Beaver’s eye. A membrane had recently contracted on the 70-year-old priest’s retina, pinching it into an uneven shape and causing him to see the world as if reflected in a hall of mirrors.

Using a joystick and a camera feed, MacLaren guided the arm of the Robotic Retinal Dissection Device, or R2D2 for short, through a tiny incision in the eye, before lifting the wrinkled membrane, no more than a hundredth of a millimeter thick, from the retina, and reversing Beaver’s vision problems.

This was the first operation performed inside the human eye using a robot. Since September, five more patients have undergone robot-assisted operations at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital in England. “My movements were improved and finessed by the robot,” MacLaren says. “I could even let go and the robot would hold everything securely in place.”

R2D2, which was developed by Preceyes BV, a Dutch medical robotics firm established by the University of Eindhoven, is not the only robot targeting the human eye.

“Building a surgical robot that can work on the size scale of the lens of an eye, which is less than 10 millimeters across, is difficult,” says Wagner, whose team began work on Axsis last April. For example, the cables that enable the robot to navigate are each 110 microns across, a little over the diameter of a human hair.

R2D2, which, according to MacLaren’s estimates, will cost around $1 million,is a prototype robot and is currently unavailable on the market.

MacLaren believes that R2D2 and other robots like it will enable surgeons to, for the first time, operate underneath the retina and interact with blood vessels in the eye. “Undoubtedly this will lead to improvements in quality of eye surgery that require highly technical procedures,” he says. “But most significantly they will open the door to new operations for which the human hand does not have the necessary control and precision.”

- Technologyreview