Assessment of tissue damage from mosquito-inspired surgical needle

Abstract

Introduction

Many percutaneous procedures utilize surgical needles to extract tissue samples in biopsy or to apply specific cancer treatments. A design of mosquito-inspired surgical needles was proposed to improve the efficacy of these procedures by reducing the needle insertion force and the resulting tissue damage. The focus of this study is to assess tissue damage caused by the insertion of a mosquito-inspired needle into soft tissues.

Material and methods

In this work, the geometric features and the dynamic stinging (insertion) mechanism of mosquito proboscis were mimicked for the design of 3D-manufactured bioinspired needle prototypes. A specially designed test setup was developed to measure the insertion force in bovine liver tissue. The histology assessment based on hematoxylin and eosin staining and image analysis was conducted to determine the bovine liver tissue damage.

Results

It was observed that the insertion force can be reduced by up to 39% and the bovine liver tissue damage was decreased by 27% using the mosquito-inspired needles when compared with using the standard needles.

Conclusion

The findings from this study suggested that the bioinspired needle design has great potential to advance surgical needles for more effective and less invasive percutaneous procedures.

Keywords:

• Surgical needle
• mosquito
• vibration
• tissue damage
• percutaneous procedure

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Ms Helen R. Freitas and Ms Hannah Sobotka-Briner from the Department of Bioengineering for their help with providing the materials and training in the Bioengineering Lab, and Dr Mohammad Kiani for the help with the cryostat machine in the Biofluidics laboratory.

Declaration of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) under grant number 1917711.