
MRI is a staple of surgical imaging, but it has the potential to do much more than take pictures. In 2011, bioengineer Pierre Dupont, PhD, and colleagues demonstrated that an MRI machine’s magnetic field could power a motor strong enough to control a robotic instrument, in this case driving a needle into an organ to do a biopsy.
But Dupont, head of the Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, wants to go further. “We had this idea, admittedly fanciful: What if you could swim robots through the body?” he says. “If you could inject something systemically and steer it to just hit your target, that would be a cool application.” …