| Clipped from: medtechinsider » Blog Archive » New Needle Designed to Reduce Medical Complications |
New Needle Designed to Reduce Medical Complications
Each year, hundreds of thousands of people suffer medical complications from hypodermic needles that penetrate too far under their skin. A new device developed by MIT engineers aims to prevent this from happening by keeping needles on target.
Diagram shows how a new needle developed at MIT works (from top to bottom): i. Doctor pushes here. ii. Filament buckles and 'locks' inside tube. iii. Additional force advances entire device. iv. Upon penetration of space, filament relaxes inside tube and deploys into space.
| Clipped from: Replacing the Doctor's Standard Needle - Future of Medicine - Popular Mechanics |
The Future of Needles: Upgrading Medicine's Most-Used Tool
Needles have existed in a form fairly similar to what we use today for thousands of years. But Jeffrey Karp has a new design—inspired by oil drilling—that, he hopes, will upgrade and automate the ubiquitous medical tool.
| Clipped from: Novel needle could cut medical complications - MIT News Office |
MIT news
The device, which is purely mechanical, is based on concepts borrowed from the oil industry. It involves a hollow S-shaped needle containing a filament that acts as a guide wire. When a physician pushes the device against a tissue, she is actually applying force only to the filament, not the needle itself, thanks to a special clutch.When the filament, which moves through the tip of the needle, encounters resistance from a firm tissue, it begins to buckle within the S-shaped tube. Due to the combined buckling and interactions with the walls of the tube, the filament locks into place "and the needle and wire advance as a single unit," said Jeffrey Karp, an affiliate faculty member of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and co-corresponding author of a recent paper on the work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Sources:
- medtechinsider » Blog Archive » New Needle Designed to Reduce Medical Complications
- Replacing the Doctor's Standard Needle - Future of Medicine - Popular Mechanics
- Novel needle could cut medical complications - MIT News Office
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