A soft robot could help doctors diagnose and treat disorders of the small intestine

Disorders of the small intestine are often difficult to diagnose and treat. More than 20 feet long, an inch in diameter, and located deep within the body, this organ is harder to access than other parts of the digestive tract, such as the colon or stomach.

To overcome those challenges, MIT engineers have designed a new robotic enteroscope that can move easily through the narrow passage of the small intestine, allowing it to perform imaging, deliver drugs, and remove small polyps or tissue samples for biopsy.

In designing the new robot, the researchers were inspired by the locomotion of snakes, as well as the scaly skin that helps them gain traction on slippery surfaces. A special textured coating helps the robot remain attached to the mucosal lining of the intestine as it inches its way through the narrow tube. 

Similar to an endoscope, the robot contains a variety of tools to help detect and treat any abnormalities that it might encounter.

“When we evaluate the small intestine, we do it for either diagnosis or treatment. If we find a little polyp that needs to be removed, this robot allows us to take a biopsy or remove it,” says Giovanni Traverso, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Traverso is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Science Robotics. The paper’s lead authors are former MIT postdoc Binbin Ying, who is now an assistant professor at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center; MIT graduate student Ahmad Mujtaba Jebran; and former MIT research scientist Sahab Babaee.

Snaking through the intestine

The most common problems that doctors need to evaluate within the small intestine include bleeding, lesions, and blockages.

Currently, the only way to diagnose those intestinal complications is with a procedure known as double balloon enteroscopy. During the procedure, an enteroscope advances through the small intestine as a health care worker alternately inflates and deflates two balloons that help propel it through the tract. 

This process is slow and laborious, so the MIT team wanted to design an alternative enteroscope that would be easier to control and could move faster through the intestine.

“The fundamental challenge that we’re trying to overcome is how to evaluate that 20-to-25-foot segment of the small intestine in a way that can be more automated,” Traverso says.

The new tube-like robot moves through the narrow small intestine using a locomotion strategy similar to that of the snake. When slithering along the ground, a snake can steer itself by first contracting muscles on one side of the body, then the other. 

To mimic this, the researchers designed multifunctional actuators that control the robot’s movement. Each actuator contains four chambers, which can be inflated in different combinations, prompting the tube to extend or bend in any direction. 

“By tuning the amount of air that goes into these chambers, you can tune the direction that the robot is moving in,” Traverso says.

The head and tail segments of the robot contain additional expandable anchoring balloons that take turns inflating and deflating, helping the robot move forward. These head and tail segments are coated with special patterned sleeves inspired by kirigami — a variation of origami that involves cutting paper as well as folding it.

Using this technique, the researchers created coatings that lie flat until they are stretched by the expansion of the balloon, which causes three-dimensional kirigami needles to pop out. Similar to the scales of a snake, these needles give the robot more traction within the slippery lining of the intestine. 

In previous work, Traverso’s lab has used this approach to create coatings for shoe soles that give them more traction, as well as stents that can temporarily lodge in the esophagus and release drugs. 

“By using kirigami sleeves to enhance surface friction, the robot can generate localized tissue engagement traction for locomotion without relying on excessive stretching of the delicate small intestinal tissue,” Jebran says.

Diagnosis and treatment

The system also includes electronics that allow for navigation, with a controller that the person operating the device can use to guide the robot through narrow passages and around tight corners. The soft robot is tethered to the external controllers by a cable and is designed so that it could enter the body through either the mouth or the rectum. 

The robot contains tools including a camera for imaging, a sprayer for drug delivery, and clips that can take tissue biopsies or remove polyps. 

In animal studies, the researchers showed that the robot could travel about six and a half feet through the small intestine. They also successfully demonstrated the drug sprayer, tissue clips, and camera. The team is now working on improving the navigation systems and testing this approach for additional applications in the small intestine.

“We hope we can continue to move it forward to eventually develop systems that can help achieve more automated evaluation of the small intestine,” Traverso says.

The research was funded, in part, by the Karl van Tassel Career Development Professorship, the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship, the UT Southwestern Medical Center Startup Fund, Samsung Semiconductor and Eurnekian Nanotechnology Graduate Student Fellowships, the Cooke Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship, and the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.