PROJECT OVERVIEW

Project Overview

Figure 1:Minimally Invasive Tool For Brain Surgery


Even though modern medicine in the twenty-first century is highly advanced there are still areas in which a lot of improvement can be made. One example is that of important life-saving brain surgeries. Currently, a surgeon has to insert a needle through the skull of the patient and reach deep parts in the brain in order to operate. However, this can be challenging and many older patients cannot have these types of surgeries since their blood vessels are more fragile. With that in mind, an idea is being developed of controlling a chip that has a magnet attached to it with a big magnet outside of the patient. This way a robot can be developed that can perform a similar surgery in a less invasive way. With that goal in mind, there is a lot of ongoing research that aims to invent different ways to control a magnet within an environment similar to the human brain.

The main goal of this project is to create a simple system that simulates a completely autonomous robot that controls a magnet that is in an environment that resembles the human brain. In order to achieve this, our group will use 0.6% agarose gel that closely imitates the brain tissue. A small spherical magnet will be put in the gel. The gel is placed in a circular dish over a circle drawn on a piece of paper. The circle will act as a path that a small spherical magnet will have to follow precisely. The dish will be held in place in by 3D printed piece that will be put over a motor. The motor will be responsible to rotate the dish. On the other side of the set-up, a bigger magnet will be placed on a distance that is precisely calculated from the interaction of the magnetic fields of the two magnets. Naturally, the big magnet will exert a pulling force on the small magnet which will start moving through the gel. Since the goal of the project is for the magnet that is inside the gel to make a full circle, a camera will be placed over the dish. The camera will observe the magnet's position at every moment during the execution. Using image processing, a coordinate system will be created with a small magnet as an origin. The motor that is underneath the dish will be connected to an Arduino board which will be responsible for controlling the speed of the rotation at every given moment. Depending on the feedback which is based on the position of the small magnet from the camera, the motor will either speed up or slow down. This way the precise completion of a full circle in the gel can be ensured.

This project includes 3D printing the full setup, creating a code that can communicate with the camera and the Arduino board so that the speed of the rotation can be controlled and calculating the magnetic fields of the chosen magnets.

3D Model of the proposed setup for the project

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 4 Progress

Image
During week 4 of our Freshman Design Project, we finalized the design of the 3D print parts and printed a sample for the part that will hold the dish. The sample, however, had a few errors in the dimensions. The hole in which the motor is supposed to go in was a little bit too small and the part that is supposed to hold the dish had slightly larger dimensions so the dish could move freely. With that in mind, we are planning to alter the dimensions so that they fit perfectly. Moreover, we are planning to make a second dish holder part for the second dish with smaller dimensions. A dish with smaller diameter means that the circle which we will have to make will be smaller and thus there will be less space for errors. When it comes to the code, we managed to get live feed in Matlab from the webcam which we purchased. In addition, we added code that can recognize circles and mark them with a red circle, however, we haven't tested the code on a perfect circle within the dish. This w...
Read more

Week 2 Progress

Week 2 Progress... Throughout week 2 of our Freshman-Design Project, we finalized the design with which we would like to approach the problem. We will 3D print a base in which the motor will clip in and rotate a 3D-printed part which will hold the dish with the gel. On the other side of the base, we will have another 3D printed piece which will hold the big magnet. We will try to make our setup adjustable so that if we make mistakes with the calculations of the magnetic fields we will be able to make adjustments without having to 3D print new parts. For now, we have decided to use an iPhone as a webcam to observe the location of the small spherical magnet within the dish and we will most likely program the image processing with MATLAB. When it comes to progress on the physical development of our setup, we ordered and received the magnets that we think will work the best. We ordered two different big magnets, with different field-strengths in order to test out which one will work...
Read more

Week 9 Progress

Image
This week was used mainly for testing our set up. We obtained all our 3D printed parts from innovation studio and we were able to test our set up during the lab session at the innovation studio. We run the image processing and motor control code when every component was set up and the small magnetic sphere made a slightly smooth orbit in the first quadrant. We were not able to complete the full orbit due to time constraints at the lab. We had some challenges with lighting. This was because of the light intensity in the innovation studio varied at different parts of the lab. Therefore, we had to move our set up around to get a good spot for the code to detect the small magnetic sphere under good lighting conditions. Also, We started preparing our final presentation slides and finalizing our final report. Figure 1: final set up Figure 2: Code detection Figure 3: small sphere in the first quadrant
Read more