Micro/nanorobots harvest energy from internal or external environments to achieve active motion. This characteristic behavior of them permits a wide range of biomedical applications, especially in endovascular systems, such as thrombus removal, wound healing, and drug delivery, because of their tiny size and controllable locomotion. However, tracking these robotic swarms in real time has been a challenge, especially for imaging modalities that rely on prolonged exposure to ionizing radiation. Now a new paper in Science Robotics (Qinglong Wang et al., Sci Robot. 2024 Feb 21;9(87):eadh1978.) reports on the use of laser speckle contrast imaging to track a swarm of magnetic nanorobots within blood vessels in real time and guide their endovascular navigation.
