The famous Chili Crab dish from Singapore inspires more than just drooling. A pair of researchers have developed a robot with two tiny crab-like pincers that attacks stomach cancer via your mouth.
Lawrence Ho, an enterologist at Singapore’s National University Hospital and Louis Phee, associate professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological Institute, co-designed the robot to combat early-stage gastrointestinal cancer. It is mounted on an endoscope along with a small camera and passed down the esophagus and into the stomach. Controlled by a surgeon, its pincers work in tandem, one claw grasping at the tumour while the other hook-shaped one neatly excises the flesh and coagulates any bleeding.
The prototype — reportedly suggested by Hong Kong surgeon, Sydney Chung, over a 2004 chilli crab dinner — has already successfully operated on five patients in Hong Kong and India. By entering through the mouth, chances for infection and scarring are greatly diminished.
“Many things are a certain way because they have evolved and adapted to certain functions … we created something that followed the human anatomy and borrowed ideas from nature and incorporated the two,” said Ho. The pair has since incorporated a company and hope to have a full-fledged product to market within three years. [PopSci — IB Times]
Image: Dr. Rosenrosen / Flickr.