A snake is probably the last thing you’d ever want crawling around your heart. But in the case of a new American-Israeli invention called the CardioARM, this medical ‘snake’ device may one day save your life. The new Israeli-American invention came by way of some brainstorming between Israel’s Dr. Alon Wolf and his American colleague Prof. Howie Choset, when Wolf was working as a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. ‘Both Howie and myself are experts in snake robotics,’ says Wolf, who is now based at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. ‘We are working with robotic snakes for search and rescue operations. So we started in the back of our minds thinking: if we can send snakes to crawl inside buildings to look for survivors, then why can’t we send the same snake inside our body to fix it?’ A few weeks later, Choset and Wolf had a eureka moment, and found a way to design a robotic snake small enough, strong enough and flexible enough to fit inside the human body. They partnered with the world-renowned Italian surgeon Prof. Marco Zenati, now at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and formed […]