MR-Compatible Pneumatic Stepper Actuator

Hey everyone,

I hope the week is treating you well. Today I will be writing about a device that uses fluid power, different than any others that you have seen. In professor Barth's lab here in Vanderbilt, there are many projects that apply fluid power, but one of them captured my interest because I though it was very ingenious. The picture I have posted is a MR-Compatible Pneumatic Stepper Actuator. As many of you might know, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a type of scan that uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to produce detailed images of the inside of the body. An MRI scanner is a large tube that contains powerful magnets. You lie inside the tube during the scan, and there is some space between your body and the tube. This space is going to be occupied by the device you see in the pictures in order to press needles into the body in different places near the scan. Doctors have been very interested in working on the patients while the patients are being scanned by the MRI, but they never could because there is a very small space left in the tube and a robot device wouldn't work because the metals from its electronics would destroy the magnetic image. The MR-Compatible Pneumatic Stepper Actuator gave a solution this problem by using fluid power instead of cables to force the needles into the patient's body and its body as you wight be able to see is all 3-D printed (plastic) which does not affect the image. I believe this is one of the most clever applications of fluid powers I've seen until now!