Accelerator on a Chip Could Lead to Improved Lasers, X-Rays

Cutting-edge research being conducted by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford Uni versity could dramatically shrink particle accelerators for science and medicine. They used a laser to accelerate electrons in a nanostructured glass chip smaller than a grain of rice.

The nanoscale patterns of SLAC and Stanford’s accelerator on a chip gleam in rainbow colors prior to being assembled and cut into their final forms. (Credit: Matt Beardsley/SLAC)

The researchers say that this technology could help enable compact accelerators and X-ray devices for medical therapy and imaging, and research in biology and materials science. Because it employs commercial lasers and low-cost, mass-production techniques, they believe it will set the stage for new generations of “tabletop” accelerators.

Their initial demonstration achieved an acceleration gradient, or amount of energy gained per length, of 300 million electronvolts per meter, roughly 10 times the acceleration provided by the current SLAC linear accelerator. The particles are boosted to nearly the speed of light, then additional acceleration increases their energy, but not their speed.

One possible application is small, portable X-ray sources to improve medical care for people injured in combat, as well as provide more affordable medical imaging for hospitals and laboratories.

For more information, visit http://www.medicaldesignbriefs.com/component/content/ article/17584.

Providing Surgical Robots with New Intelligence

Nabil Simaan testing a surgical robot that he designed. (Credit: Joe Howell, Vanderbilt

Providing surgical robots with a new type of machine intelligence to make them easier and more intuitive for surgeons to operate is the goal of a collaboration of research teams at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

One of the project’s objectives is to restore the type of sensory awareness surgeons have during open surgery, where they can directly see and touch internal organs and tissue, which is lost through minimally invasive surgery working through small incisions in a patient’s skin.

The researchers intend to create a system that acquires data from a number of different types of sensors as an operation is underway and integrates them with pre-operative information to produce dynamic, real-time maps that precisely track the position of the robot probe and show how the tissue in its vicinity responds to its movements.

The engineers also intend to create what they call “virtual fixtures,” which are pre-programmed restrictions on the robot’s actions. For example, a robot might be instructed not to cut in an area where a major blood vessel has been identified.

For more information, visit http://www.medicaldesignbriefs.com/component/content/article/17638.