Video Wednesday

The da Vinci Xi--once more.

Report from IEEE ICRA -- part2

The obvious rise of medical robotics was witnessed at IEEE ICRA. (Check the first part of the report here.) This year, we have even seen parallel medical robotics sessions running at the conference, and the overall large number of CIS related papers (75+ with the keyword medical robot ) gave a huge challenge to people who wanted to check them all. Let us give a little overview of what trends are emerging, based on the sessions:

• Force control for medical robot  (I-II): mostly adaptations to the known systems by the large groups (retinal microsurgery at Hopkins, surgical debridement at Berkeley, hand-held microsurgical forceps at Imperial)
• Force sensing for medical robot: FBGs and all kinds of other fun
• Planning for medical robots : e.g., for tooth preparation
• Safety: it is absolutely welcomed to see the rise of safety issues; new frameworks are being proposed for serving the “safety by design” concept. The ISO/IEC standardization folks may well benefit from it. Another tool for safe bone drilling came from UTokyo.
• Design (I-II): a new retinal surgery setup from KUL, skull base system from Leibniz,
• Estimation: Probably these talks have covered the most typically expected topic, including image-based information processing and control for beating heart surgery.
• Laparoscopy and flexible endoscopes
• Continuum robots: this field has been dominating conferences for years now, it was time to organize a specific track for that. Our favorite is the new hand-held design from Vanderbilt University. (The lab of Bob Webster is often featured here for its merits.)

Image credit: U. Vanderbilt,  UW.

Quiz #9

Solution for our last, Quiz#8 was the Titan's SPORT system current prototype. (Learn more about it here.) We received a kind-of correct solution from "crazymerkz"--congratulations!

Next one: which system can be seen above? You can submit your answers to surgrob.blog at gmail.com until August 30.

CIS news

• Robocast technology: positioning dental implants
• Robotic prostate surgery dominating the decade
• Japanese government to support robotics surgery
• HIFU is emerging
• Skeptical Scapel on surgery in space
• IMRIS got a new website 
• Terrestrial spinoff of space research
• Cognitive assessment of surgeons at U. Buffalo
•   PhD openings in Biomedical Robotics at  the IIT

CFPs:

• Submit to our IROS Workshop on Human-robot Collaboration in Standardization
• Submit to our IROS Workshop on Ontologies for Robotics
• Submit to SPIE2015
• CRAS deadline extended to Aug. 20!
• IDEAS workshop at Harvard

Video Wednesday

Hamlyn Robotics: Meet the robots helping surgeons

Robotic SurgePedia

The draft Robotic SurgePedia is a portal for the European Robotic Surgery Project.
Once it gets finished, it will contain a lot of useful information in a structured format, allowing to build an ontology around it.

"Robotic SurgePedia is a community platform to identify available competences and potential missing topics in the field of robotics assisted surgery with the help of collective intelligence." 

"Robotic SurgePedia is a community platform to identify available competences and potential missing topics in the field of robotics assisted surgery with the help of collective intelligence.  The pages are written by qualified experts, like in Scholarpedia. It is fostered by machine recommendation systems and disseminates knowledge for non-experts, also by translating and simplifying expert texts. Potential patients get qualified, cost-effective and easy-to-understand solutions and answers without personal contact, can share information with others with the same problem, and can participate actively in searching for the solution. Medical experts/surgeons receive new high quality information quickly to update their knowledge, gain recognition, visibility, and patients. They can realize underlying hidden problems of their patients as well. Pharmaceuticals, business-oriented partners in the fields of surgery, robotic developments, etc. can prove and advertise methods, discover new directions and ideas for developments, get potential clients and business partners.  We generate an interactive dialogue, where users can comment, blog, chat or use the mediawiki pages for communication. The plan is to maintain activities after the project’s lifetime."

Friday fun

Robots will never replace humans...