A device called Hummingbird, made during the study phase of ESA’s Darwin project, a constellation of space telescopes, has been adapted for use in the field of eye surgery. The doctors of the University Eye Clinic Maastricht in the Netherlands, will be able to carry out high-precision surgery on the eyes of patients without vibration problem.
The problem for surgeons rose from the vibrations that often created risks during delicate eye surgery. They require extreme precision, so much that doctors use a microscope to magnify the eye area they’re operating on. Under these conditions, when the instruments are moved fractions of a millimeter, any vibration can generate images too shaky to work.
When patients suffering from retinal detachment arrive, surgeons must operate within a day, two at most, in order to save their sight. The retina has a thickness of about half a millimeter and it’s sometimes necessary to operate on the epiretinal membrane, which is ten times thinner. It’s clear that the image must be perfectly stable in order to perform such delicate surgery.
An analysis of the causes of the vibration determined that they were in part caused by the wind hitting the building of the Eye Clinic. Those are very reduced vibrations but still too high to perform surgery that require the utmost precision. The solution was found by MECAL, a Dutch company that adapted a device built for ESA’s Darwin project.
Darwin was a proposal to build a constellation of space-based telescopes to use as planet hunters. In the study phase of this project, a device was built that combined the light seen by each of the instruments into a single image. The problem was that the vibrations coming from the street outside the laboratory interfered with that work, just as they did at the University Eye Clinic Maastricht.
To solve the problem, TNO, a Dutch research organization that was running the study phase of the Darwin project, created Hummingbird. It’s a device which detects vibrations and compensates by pushing the instruments in the opposite direction. The concept has already been used in the past but Hummingbird uses an innovative mechanism of “horizontal coupling” which keeps horizontal vibration sensors level at all times. This allows to prevent errors in its work that can occur with extremely low-frequency vibrations.
The Darwin project hasn’t gone beyond the study phase but Hummingbird has found an extremely useful use in another field. In the future, it may also be used in other types of surgery that require extreme precision, such as neurosurgery. It’s yet another excellent way in which technologies developed for space missions got adapted to other uses.
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