The World in 2030

300 The World in 2030
Under the headline ‘Plastic Robot Allows Remote Surgery
With Live Imaging’, the newsletter of the John Hopkins
Hospital in Baltimore, USA explains:
Technologies like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
have made possible a revolution in diagnostic medicine.
But the revolution stops there, because MRIs,
which are basically huge magnets, are incompatible
with surgical tools.
As a result, doctors can look at a tumor, but they cannot
operate on it under an MRI. That barrier might
have been broken by a new robot without any metal
or electrical parts.
The robot also uses light for fiber optic encoding, an
extremely reliable method of transmitting light information
without any significant loss along its path. The
purpose of the fiber optic component is that it can
function as a circuit, detecting and monitoring the
motion of the robot without using any electricity.
When the plastic gears rotate, their motion disrupts
the fiber optic light source, acting as a signal and allowing
the system to know its location and status.
The finished motor was designed in two sizes to allow
for variation in step magnitude. Amazingly the
motor’s width still measures less than the length of
a pen. 527
Plastics are already playing a central role in healthcare
technology, a role that will increase in the coming decades.