Mechanical Engineering professors Larry Howell and Spencer Magleby at Brigham Young University have spent the past five years applying the principles of origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, to engineering. Now, they are turning their attention to applying those principles to surgical technology, which could allow for the manufacturing of instruments so small that the size of incisions necessary to accommodate the tools can heal on their own—without sutures.

Fig. 1 – Spencer Magleby, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, looks over origami-inspired surgical devices. (Credit: Mark Philbrick)
“The whole concept is to make smaller and smaller incisions,” Howell said. “To that end, we’re creating devices that can be inserted into a tiny incision and then deployed inside the body to carry out a specific surgical function.”

The researchers say their work is inspired by a need for increasingly smaller surgical tools and that industry has reached the limit of miniaturization of traditional designs. The researchers have engineered new design concepts that eliminate the need for pin joints and other parts, instead relying on the deflection inherent in origami to create motion. (See Figure 1)

“These small instruments will allow for a whole new range of surgeries to be performed—hopefully one day manipulating things as small as nerves,” Magleby said. “The origami-inspired ideas really help us to see how to make things smaller and smaller and to make them simpler and simpler.”

One such instrument is a roboticallycontrolled forceps so small it can pass through a hole about 3 millimeters in size—roughly the thickness of two pennies held together.

The team is also developing concepts such as the D-Core, a device that starts out flat (to be inserted into an incision) then expands to become two rounded surfaces that roll on each other, mimicking the movement made by spinal discs.

Magleby says the work they are doing on medical devices is not much different in principle than the work they’ve done for NASA to create compact space equipment.

“Those who design spacecraft want their products to be small and compact because space is at a premium on a spacecraft, but once you get in space, they want those same products to be large, such as solar arrays or antennas,” Magleby said. “There’s a similar idea here: We’d like something to get quite small to go through the incision, but once it’s inside, we’d like it to get much larger.”

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