by Elizabeth Uehling
Shane Farritor’s career so far has included research for NASA in its Mars Rovers project; miniature surgical robots; highway safety markers; and improving the maintenance and safety of railroad tracks.
And he’s just getting started.
Farritor is a professor of mechanical and materials engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where teaching and research balance with collaborations on projects that save lives, improve surgical outcomes and make a substantial economic impact.
In 2003, Farritor partnered with Dr. Dmitry Oleynikov, chief of gastrointestinal and minimally invasive surgery at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, to produce a robotic arm that could perform abdominal colon resection surgery.
The University of Nebraska Medical Center bought a very early version of a robot, Farritor said, but Farritor and Oleynikov knew it could be improved.
“It was a big robot outside the body, and we thought that was the mainframe computer of its day. What we really need are small, agile things,” Farritor said. “We need little robots that go on the inside instead of big robots that go on the outside.”
The two co-founded Virtual Incision Corporation, a privately-funded company that partners with the University of Nebraska, to create robot-assisted surgical technologies. The target application for the robots is a procedure called colon resection surgery, Farritor said. Patients with diseases of the gastrointestinal system such as diverticulitis, inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer may need surgery, which, up to now, signaled a major surgical procedure with a long recovery period.
The Virtual Incision robot, however, enters the body through a 4-centimeter incision (less than 2 inches) in the belly button, he said. The robot is guided by a surgeon using a computer. “You can be out of the hospital in two days,” Farritor said, adding that it is better for the patient and also has a significant economic benefit. The Virtual Incision robot was used successfully in a human surgery in the spring of 2016.
The success of small robots attracted the interest of the U.S. Army and also NASA. “Both NASA and the army want to do surgery in crazy, remote locations, and our robots are very portable,” Farritor said.
“There are about 300,000 people in the United States every year who have an 8- to 10-inch incision through their abdomen,” Farritor said. “It’s very traumatic. You will be in the hospital for 10-12 days, and it will take six weeks before you start to feel normal again.
“I tell my graduate students every day ‘we need to make a robot so that 300,000 people per year in the U.S. can go from a 10-day hospital stay to a two-day hospital stay.’ And that’s a good reason to get up in the morning.”