Multimaterial Fibres for Precision Surgery - from Bench to Bedside

Dr. Burak Temelkuran, Job Title:

[Abstract]

At the beginning of the new millennium, a polymer sheet coated with a chalcogenide glass, rolled around a sacrificial mandrel and drawn into a fibre presented a number of novelties: A new way of guiding light, a waveguide not limited with its materials’ optical properties and hence having the ability to transmit light at any chosen wavelength, nanometre scale control of features and geometries at kilometre length scales, and last but not the least, baby steps of the field of multimaterial fibres that changed the way we think about fibres. The resulting fibre found its immediate application in the medical field, and helped a few hundred thousand patients to get better up to date in various surgical specialities as a precise optical scalpel.

The enriched choice of materials, together with the ability to achieve exotic geometries using technologies such as 3D printing, we have focused to explore further potential contribution of multimaterial fibres to medicine. The ability to integrate and miniaturize various functions on a single fibre underpins the fibrebot we are developing, a fibre robot that can navigate through the natural lumens of the body equipped with imaging, sensing and therapeutic capabilities.

Enabling the integration of focused energy delivery mechanisms with the fibre based robotic platforms, the multimaterial fibre technology forms the foundations of a new set of medical devices advancing therapeutic and diagnostic potential in precision surgery.

[Biography]

Burak Temelkuran, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London, UK. He received his MS (1996) and PhD (2000) degrees from Department of Physics at Bilkent University, Turkey. As a postdoctoral researcher at MIT (2000-2002), Dr. Temelkuran has contributed to the discovery of the 1D omnidirectional reflecting fiber that has been used in over 150,000 surgeries, and his research pioneered the field of multi-material fibres. Dr. Temelkuran has joined the Hamlyn Centre in 2016, and his research is targeting unmet needs in medicine, with his expertise in the field of multi-material fibres and his 15 years of experience in the industry bridging engineering and medical sciences.