The endoscope-like arm performed surgery inside the body of a living patient.

A team of Australian engineers has developed a robot that performs surgery by 3D printing biomaterial on the surface of organs. To reconstruct the tissue, the endoscope-like arm works by snaking its way to a given location inside the body of the living patient.

The device, assembled by the Medical Robotic Lab of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, can also act to make precise incisions and clean up a wound.

It features a three-axis printing head directly mounted onto the tip of a soft robotic arm. This printing head, which consists of soft artificial muscles that allow it to move in three directions, works very similarly to conventional desktop 3D printers.

The soft robotic arm can bend and twist due to hydraulics and can be fabricated at any length required. Its stiffness can be finely tuned using different types of elastic tubes and fabrics.

This sort of operation greatly reduces the risk of infection, as the machine does not need a large open field for intervention, the university said in a release. 

"Our flexible 3D bioprinter means biomaterials can be directly delivered into the target tissue or organs with a minimally invasive approach.

This system offers the potential for the precise reconstruction of three-dimensional wounds inside the body, such as gastric wall injuries or damage and disease inside the colon," it reads.

The robot, known as F3DB and operated by human doctors, is only half an inch in diameter and is powered by a hydraulic mechanism to move around. In a demonstration video shown by the Australian institution, the device acts as an all-in-all tool to perform the dissection of a tissue, washes a wound with a water jet, and prints on a pig kidney. 

Experiments showed the cells were not affected by the process, with the majority of the cells observed to be alive post-printing. The cells then continued to grow for the next seven days, with four times as many cells observed one week after printing.

The findings of the research “Advanced Soft Robotic System for In Situ 3D Bioprinting and Endoscopic Surgery” were published in the journal Advanced Science.