One of the biggest problems facing ophthalmologists – that is, scientists who study the eye, not to be confused with ornithologists under any circumstances whatsoever – is a lack of effective tools to quickly and accurately diagnose oxygen levels in a patient’s retina.
As you may have noticed, the eye is an extremely sensitive organ. When ophthalmologists decide that they need to operate on a patient’s retina, the utmost care has to be taken to manipulate the eye’s tissue as little as possible.
Over the course of the last few years, Professor Bradley Nelson, the Head of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems and current Guinness World Record holder for “Most Advanced Mini Robot for Medical Use,” has been working on, shockingly, mini robots for medical use, and one of his team’s recent inventions is perfectly tuned to help detect oxygen levels in retinas while also being minimally invasive.
According to Prof. Nelson, “I picture [our robots] like the robots that we use these days to chart the ocean floor… With our microrobot, we can chart the oxygen levels of the inner eye liquid – the vitreous - along the retina."
The millimeter-long robots work due to the behavior of a fluorescent dye that reacts to the amount of oxygen present in its surroundings. When pulsed with a certain wavelength of light, the dye emits a fluorescent light that then begins to fade at a rate depending on the presence of oxygen. The more oxygen, the faster the light fades.
After Nelson’s lab conducted recent tests in water, researchers achieved results that they believe are “sufficient for diagnostic use within the eye.”
In the future, ophthalmologists may be able to inject Prof. Nelson’s microrobots into a patient’s eye to progressively monitor the levels of oxygen within their retinas, potentially fending off blindness.
Image Courtesy of ETH Zurich