A dragonfly's view of surgery:
Hongrui Jiang receives CAREER award
inimally invasive medical procedures, while beneficial for patients, create a unique challenge for surgeons: operation without sight. To see inside a patient without open surgery, doctors use a laparoscope, or a camera attached to a small tube that is inserted into the body cavity receiving the operation. However, the surgeon’s view is limited to the camera’s angle. The operating team must stop the procedure to move or turn the laparoscope whenever it needs to adjust the view. The National Science Foundation has awarded Assistant Professor Hongrui Jiang a $400,002 Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) to give doctors a dragonfly’s-eye view of surgery.
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Dragonflies, like other insects, have compound eyes—eyes made of thousands of tiny lenses, called ommatidia, arranged in a hemisphere. Each ommatidium captures light from one specific angle. The information from all the ommatidia combines to form an image, like pixels on a screen. The spherical shape gives dragonflies a very wide field of view and excellent motion detection. However, these eyes lack one important feature: They cannot focus. Without the muscles that tune human eyes to see objects at different depths, insects see things at low resolution, depending on the number of ommatidia and proximity to an object.
Jiang’s project combines the merits of compound eyes and camera-type eyes. Leveraging liquid microlens technology he has developed, Jiang and his research team plan to build spherical arrays of tiny lenses that use hydrogels like artificial muscles to focus. “Each individual lens is tunable, so that we can zoom in and zoom out within a certain range to maintain the high resolution,” says Jiang.
If successful, a laparoscope with one of these artificial compound eyes could cover a complete cavity while fixed in one place, making surgery even less invasive while giving surgeons better sight. “If you want to focus on a certain area, you can zoom in that part of the lens,” says Jiang. The technology could also be applied to other medical imaging, such as endoscopy, or to surveillance or military purposes.
The NSF CAREER awards, among the most prestigious given to faculty members who are just beginning their academic careers, are granted to creative projects that integrate research and education effectively.
