With £6.1 million of funding from the EPSRC, the University of Glasgow (www.gla.ac.uk) will lead a project called ‘Surgery enabled by ultrasonics’ over the next five years, working with the universities of Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds and Southampton to take advantage of the opportunities offered by ultrasonic technologies and ensure that they are widely adopted for surgery.

The researchers will develop miniaturised ultrasonic tools that rely on different principles to excite the surgical tip.

Miniaturisation is possible because of new dynamic structures for the tips and emerging piezo-crystal materials with much higher energy density; the tools will be delivered deep into the human body by new surgical robots to undertake minimally invasive surgery — involving high precision, low force and better preservation of delicate tissue structures.