According to the World Stroke Organization, one in four adults will have a stroke at some point in their lifetime.

Worldwide, this adds up to 12.2 million strokes every year – and 6.5 million of those people will die as a result of their stroke.

For those who survive, some have life-changing consequences, including disability, struggles with speech and eating, and more. According to the charity, at least 101 million people are living with the after-effects of strokes worldwide, largely as a result of the difficulty of treating strokes before they have lifelong impacts on the patient.

That’s because strokes – in this case ischemic strokes, in which a blood clot prevents oxygen from flowing to the brain – can cause damage to the brain and the body in even a short space of time, meaning that doctors are in a race against the clock to remove the clot as quickly as possible.

Due to the difficulties of invasive procedures on the brain and the limitations of current technology, all too often doctors struggle to remove the clots, either in full or at all, leading to serious long-term consequences, and even the death of the patient.

However, thanks to newly developed technology from Stanford University School of Engineering, the sorry statistics could very soon be a thing of the past, with more patients seeing their clots removed fully and quickly than ever before, therefore saving their lives and preventing, or at least reducing the severity of lifelong symptoms.

The new device, a tiny robot called the milli-spinner, could soon be used in a procedure known as milli-spinner thrombectomy, thanks to its proven capacity to remove blood clots more efficiently and effectively than existing technology, with the team’s impressive results recently published in the journal Nature.

In fact, its success rate is staggering, as the study’s co-author – Stanford’s Jeremy Heit – explained in a statement:

“For most cases, we’re more than doubling the efficacy of current technology, and for the toughest clots – which we’re only removing about 11% of the time with current devices – we’re getting the artery open on the first try 90% of the time. It’s unbelievable. This is a sea-change technology that will drastically improve our ability to help people.”

While the current technology sucks out blood clots from an artery, the success rate simply isn’t high enough due to the lack of precision of existing methods, meaning that sometimes clots get broken up instead of totally sucked out, leaving them to roam the body and potentially cause further serious consequences.

The milli-spinner, however, first works on making the clot smaller before it is sucked out, to ensure total removal. This takes advantage of the clot’s composition, in which fibrous strands tangle red blood cells together.

By spinning the clot rapidly, the researchers found that they are able to compress the fibers into a small ball (up to 5% of its initial size) to easily extract, whilst releasing the trapped red blood cells back into the body, as they explain in the statement:

“Imagine a loose ball of cotton fibers (or a handful of long hair pulled from a hairbrush, if you’d prefer). If you press it between your palms (compression) and rub your hands together in a circle (shear), the fibers will become increasingly tangled into a smaller, denser ball. The milli-spinner is able to do this same thing to the fibrin threads in a clot, using suction to compress the clot against the end of the tube and rapidly spinning to create the necessary shear.”

And as the paper’s senior author Renee Zhao continued, this change is significant in the ability to treat patients efficiently, so that their brain cells can have their oxygen flow returned as quickly as possible:

“With existing technology, there’s no way to reduce the size of the clot. They rely on deforming and rupturing the clot to remove it. What’s unique about the milli-spinner is that it applies compression and shear forces to shrink the entire clot, dramatically reducing the volume without causing rupture. It works so well, for a wide range of clot compositions and sizes. Even for tough, fibrin-rich clots, which are impossible to treat with current technologies, our milli-spinner can treat them using this simple yet powerful mechanics concept to densify the fibrin network and shrink the clot.”

Thanks to its incredible success in testing, the research team are hoping to get the milli-spinner rolled out into clinical settings as soon as possible. They’re also experimenting with free-swimming milli-spinners that could work in the body without the use of a catheter, as well as possibilities for the technology to aid other conditions including kidney stones.

And with the technology constantly developing, these tiny robots could one day be saving your life too.

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