Design and Mechanics of Honeybee-Inspired Surgical Needle

Abstract

Surgical needles are widely used in minimally invasive surgery procedures such as tissue/tumor biopsy, deep brain stimulation, thermal ablation, brachytherapy and most importantly drug delivery. There has been a growing interest to design and develop innovative needles to improve the current state of the art needling technology. In the aforementioned procedures, needle deviates from the path to its target (e.g., tissue/tumor). This path deviation always poses a problem for example in extracting specific biopsy samples. Our hypothesis is that the insertion and extraction forces on the interface of the needle and tissues play a major role in the needle path deflection and tissue damage. In order to test this hypothesis, insect stingers, particularly honeybee stinger is explored since its stinger has a complex but elegant mechanics when it engages on human skins. Preliminary studies have been conducted to study some designs of the bioinspired needles, such as insertion force and deflection of the needle [1]. The data showed that the insertion force of the needle decreased by 25% using needles mimicking the honeybee stingers. The focus of this work is to study the effect of needle barbs on the extraction forces. Some optimized honeybee-inspired needles have been developed and tested as shown in Fig. 1a. The results showed that the extraction forces can also be reduced.