U Team Creates Robot to Revolutionize Retinal Surgery

When surgeons operate on the retina—a layer of cells less than one millimeter thick—they must account for patients’ breathing and eye movements, and their own hand tremors. One wrong move on one of the smallest, most delicate parts of the human body can mean the difference between sight and blindness.

That’s why researchers at the U’s John A. Moran Eye Center and the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering have created a robotic surgery device that aims to give surgeons “superhuman” hands.

Operated by a surgeon using a haptic stylus, the robot executes movements as little as one micrometer—smaller than a single human cell. The device, which mounts directly to a patient’s head using a helmet, compensates for head movements while scaling down the surgeon’s hand motions and eliminating tremors.

Because the device isn’t yet approved for human use, testing required a volunteer fitted with special goggles that allowed researchers to mount a pig eye just in front of their natural eye. This setup let them test the robot’s precision on animal tissue while compensating for human head motion—at no risk to the volunteer.

The experiments, published in Science Robotics, showed higher success subretinal injection rates than some documented manual surgery rates. The research was led by engineering professor Jake Abbott MS’01 and retinal specialist Paul S. Bernstein.

“Treatments for vision disorders are rapidly advancing,” Abbott says. “We need to give surgeons better ability to keep up with them.”

The robot aims to improve gene therapy delivery for inherited retinal diseases, potentially allowing patients to have procedures under IV sedation rather than general anesthesia.

“These collaborations are just wonderful at the University of Utah,” Bernstein says. “When I have ideas, the engineers, the chemists, and the physicists are just a few blocks away.”