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When surgeons are operating on a patient, they need a lot of tools and space to get the job done. That can lead to some pretty big incisions that take a while to heal and sometimes get infected.
Innovations in what's called minimally invasive surgery have changed this, to an extent. But is it possible to make a surgical cut so small that it can heal on its own?
Mechanical engineering student Jason Dearden helps with the origami-inspired research at Brigham Young University.
Mark Philbrick
Now they are turning their attention to the human body, finding new ways to design wide, flat tools that can be folded up into something narrower. "You want it to go in from as small a hole as possible," Lang says in a video about the research.
The research is in its early stages, but the goal is for the new surgical devices to make incisions so small that they would heal much faster and require few (or zero) stitches.
Mechanical engineering professor Spencer Magleby looks over his origami-inspired surgical devices.
Mark Philbrick
One of their devices takes inspiration from the "<a href="http://www.origamiway.com/origami-chomper.shtml">chomper</a>" origami fold.
You can see how the finished stainless-steel surgical tool still looks like a chomper. It's only 4 millimeters.
3D-printing the parts, engineering professor Spencer Magleby says in the video, allows them to go from an idea to a finished prototype in less than a day.
The researchers signed a licensing agreement with <a href="http://www.davincisurgery.com/">Intuitive Surgical</a>, the company that makes the da Vinci robotic surgery system. The tools are designed to be held and used by a surgical robot like da Vinci, not a person.
The company plans to use the lab's chomper tool, which is smaller than its current one and has fewer parts.
"Instead of trying to make that complexity smaller and smaller," Magleby says in the video, "we're going for simplicity early."
A recent review noted that practical applications of origami technique are now being explored in aerospace, biomedicine, packaging, storage, manufacturing, robotics, and more.
