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; percutaneous procedure; tissue damage; vibration.