MIT's Snake Robot Makes Intestinal Diagnosis Easier

Doctors just got a powerful new tool to solve one of medicine's trickiest challenges: reaching deep into the 20-foot-long small intestine to find what's causing pain, bleeding, or blockages.

MIT engineers designed a soft robot that moves like a snake, inching its way through the narrow, winding passage of the small intestine. Unlike current methods that require slow, tedious procedures with inflating balloons, this robot can be steered smoothly through tight corners while performing biopsies, removing polyps, and delivering medications.

The robot's secret lies in nature's design. Snakes slither by contracting muscles on alternating sides of their bodies, and they use scales to grip slippery surfaces. The MIT team copied both strategies.

The device contains four air-filled chambers that inflate in different combinations, letting doctors steer it in any direction with a simple controller. Special sleeves inspired by kirigami (the Japanese art of cutting and folding paper) cover the robot's head and tail sections. When balloons inflate, tiny needle-like scales pop out to grip the intestinal lining, just like snake scales grabbing the ground.

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

Right now, diagnosing small intestine problems requires double balloon enteroscopy, where medical staff manually inflate and deflate two balloons to inch an endoscope forward. It's exhausting for doctors and uncomfortable for patients.

The Ripple Effect

This breakthrough could help millions of people suffering from mysterious digestive problems. The small intestine sits deep in the body, making it the hardest part of the digestive tract to examine compared to the stomach or colon.

Faster, easier diagnosis means catching problems earlier, from bleeding and lesions to blockages and early-stage cancers. Patients could spend less time in procedures and get answers sooner about what's causing their symptoms.

The research team, led by former MIT postdoc Binbin Ying and graduate student Ahmad Mujtaba Jebran, published their findings in Science Robotics. The same technology behind the robot's grippy coating has already been used in shoe soles for better traction and medical stents that deliver drugs in the esophagus.

Sometimes the best solutions come from watching how nature already solved the problem millions of years ago.