For awhile medical instruments have been around, cleaning brushes have been used to help with the sanitization process. Once in a while reading a book about American-Made surgical instruments, I couldn't help but notice how there was a cleaning brush along with a civil war amputation set. No longer do we use industrial brushes, toothbrushes or even surgeon's hand scrub brushes to do our cleaning. But now-a-days we have various surgical instrument brushes for different cleaning purposes. For cleaning even the smallest hand held surgical instruments in addition to suction tubes like laparoscopic instruments, forceps and flexible endoscopes.
Over the decades the surgical instrument manufacturing process has came along way. Many brushes are known as wire twisted. This means they have to twist the 2 pieces of wire in together to keep the nylon bristles in order. Up until the 1950's this wire was made of galvanized steel, this minimized the brushs life expendency and made it rust. This is why today the vast majority of cleaning brushes are created by surgical stainless steel wire and medical grade nylon. Brush technology has advance in recent years by using a new procedure which extends its life. They use medical-grade nylon and stainless steel wire.
As previously stated, there are many different cleaning brushes out there which is why its important to use the appropriate one. For instance, if you use a brush with a circumference that is to large, the brush does not effectively clean. If the bristle diameter is tootiny, the brush will not touch the sides of the lumen and will not clean.