By now, it’s starting to seep into our consciousness that robots are about to take over Surgery as a medical sub-industry. Today, we show you another way that robots are being refined to conduct medical procedures on humans in the future.
This video demonstrates the use of a brain surgery robot on a fruit fly. Fruit flies, in general, are the choice of the scientific community in terms of research. The reasons are numerous, such as the fact that 75% of human genes are also present in the fruit fly. Aside from that, they easily breed, and are inexpensive to maintain. It is logical, then, that robots are now being used to study fruit flies’ brain structure.
According to the initial application of the robot, around 1,000 fruit flies were dissected in a 10-hour period. By contrast, manually dissecting fruit flies could be a rather tricky ordeal, with the process ranging from catching the fly, to rendering it immobile, as well as dissecting with tools that can manipulate the fly’s brain for research.
This machine, then, will allow a more in-depth study into the neural structures of the fruit fly, allowing medical researchers to learn more about the mechanisms and structures of brains in general, as well as to find out the causes of brain degeneration.
In spite of the fact that the machine is very dexterous, precise, and accurate, the researchers who pioneered the technology aren’t keen on outlining its use for human brain surgery anytime soon, however. The researchers are far more keen on employing the use of the technology to study neurological degeneration on fruit flies and a range of other insects, for the meantime.
On Fruit Fly Brain Dissection:
- Inside the Brains of Fruit Flies
- Decoding the Human Brain, With Help From a Fly
- Robots Can Perform Brain Surgery on Flies
- A Robot That Can Perform Brain Surgery on a Fruit Fly
Fruit Flies And Brain Research Papers:
- Networks in the Fruit Fly Brain
- Dexterous robotic manipulation of alert adult Drosophila for high-content experimentation
- A Simple One-step Dissection Protocol for Whole-mount Preparation of Adult Drosophila Brains
- Drosophila melanogaster as a Model Organism of Brain Diseases
- Visualization of synaptic domains in the Drosophila brain by magnetic resonance microscopy at 10 micron isotropic resolution
Regarding The Use Of Fruit Flies In Scientific Research: