The complex anatomy at the base of the human skull is difficult to approach without creating damage to the brain. Still for some diseases it is important that the scull base can be reached, so that surgeons can cure patients and improve their expectancy of life.

Already working in the field of biomedical engineering but not yet aware of this great and important challenge, in the year 2003, I was walking around through the faculty 3mE, pondering about squid tentacles and steerable instruments for keyhole surgery. At that time, the existing steering mechanisms were large and complex and it was my dream to find a solution that would be easy to make and to miniaturize.

Already from my early childhood I have been fascinated by mechanical things, either designed by mankind or found within animals or human bodies. Taking apart nearly every machine that came into my hands, and studying biological and human anatomy boo ks from the moment I could read, I have always been wondering why things are made as they are and how they can be improved. Being by nature not an investigator but a creator with a desire to invent innovative mechanisms and devices, I decided at the passing of secondary school to study mechanical engineering in Delft. But my fascination for biology and anatomy stayed and as my design activities, first as a student and later as a researcher, progressed, I finally managed to unite all my interests and to find an exciting home base at the crossroads of science, design, medicine and biology.

I never get out-of-the-box ideas in my office; I always need spurs from a dynamic environment around me to escape from settled ideas in my mind and to combine crazy concepts that seem impossible to connect. Sometimes it is a windy beach that gives me inspiration, sometimes the small but vivid town centre of Delft. This time it were the activities in the 3mE building around me making me realize that muscular hydrostatic skeleton systems in squid tentacles could lead to an ingenious solution to the problem of steering. By translating biology to technology and replacing muscles by industrial cables and springs, I invented a steering mechanism that could do the trick. Although it looked so bizarre that my colleagues could not imagine it working, I continued to believe in the idea and decided to have it made. And after a long voyage of designing and creating and a lot of sleepless nights with fears that my colleagues would be right, finally a prototype was devised with an incredible precision so that, in case it would not work, the cause would be the underlying principle and not the manufacturing.

With my heart pounding after so many months of waiting I tried to steer the prototype for the very first time. And it worked well, even much better than I could dream of! I was blown away and the whole day I was playing, captivated by the mechanism that was till then only functioning in my mind. As it turned out to be a novel idea far away from the existing technology, the mechanism was patented worldwide and a spin-off company was founded. The invention was the start of a fascinating journey in which an enthusiastic team of students and designers helped me to create world’s thinnest steerable surgical instruments and worm-like multi-maneuverable devices. It was this progress that gave me the energy and strength to write a compelling VICI-proposal that – after an awful lot of creative thinking and writing – was granted last month with a huge research budget allowing me to extend the squid-technology to the challenging new field of scull base surgery. I am really very curious what will come from that!!

Driven by evolutionary laws or by an intelligent spirit, nature follows alternative design pathways leading to amazing and sometimes unimaginable solutions many of which are still not completely understood. Mankind is not perfect, nature either, but it is this difference, with answers that seem sometimes weird but at the same time often elegant and beautiful, that makes nature so interesting and a joy to study. The living world around us is still only partly unravelled, like an undiscovered wilderness of clever ideas waiting for someone to find an application. Exploring this wilderness to create useful, new technology truly feels like boldly going where no man has gone before…

Delft Integraal article Movable tool tip for keyhole surgery (pages 13 to 17)

About Paul Breedveld

Paul Breedveld studied mechanical engineering at TU Delft, where he graduated cum laude in 1991. After a PhD on human-machine interfaces for manually controlled space manipulators, which he finished cum laude in 1996, he decided to switch to the medical field and started a research line on steerable surgical instruments.

Sponsored by a prestigious research grant from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), he continued the research with developing medical devices inspired by clever solutions in nature.

Cooperating with a number of academic hospitals, medical companies and biological and technical research groups, the research within his group BITE (Bio-Inspired Technology) is currently concentrated in two research lines: one on maneuverable instruments based on biological muscular hydrostats and the other on adhesive surgical devices based on biological adhesion.

The research has resulted in a number of patents and patent applications that are being commercialized by two spin-off companies: DEAM B.V. (steerable instruments) and Coalong B.V. (adhesive devices). Being a member of the BIOKON International Biomimetics Association and having received a number of awards among which recently a prestigious VICI-grant on the development of multi-armed dendritic instrumentation for scull base surgery, Breedveld is currently associate professor at the Bio-Mechanical Engineering department of the faculty 3mE at TU Delft.