MRCIIS – winter scool on surgical robotics

The Center for Computer-integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST ERC) organized a unique event back in January 2009 for young professionals and PhD students. The MRCIIS (Medical Robotics and Computer-Integrated Interventional Systems) was a week-long winter school on advanced medical technologies. It was co-organized with the celebration and Graduation Event of the 10-year-old CISST center at the Johns Hopkins University. 35 graduate students and professionals took part in the program from 7 countries to be given coverage on the most recent technological advancements in CIS, to take a close-up look on cutting-edge research projects and a hands-on experience with some of the most amazing robots.
The first day was the celebration of the ERC jubilee, with great overview talks on the achievements of the center, and the rest of the week was covered busy with lectures and tutorials. Most of the presentations are available online at the MRCIIS’ site, and also linked below.

The topic of the first day’s session was Surgical CAD/CAM: on procedures performed based on preoperative plans or image guidance, including a talk about:

• Image-Guided Interventions – Gabor Fichtinger shared his views on how important it is to gradually upgrade critical tools and functions in the OR.
  
• Medical Image Computing – Luc Soler talked about the segmentation technique applied in their open source medical imaging software, the VR – Render.
• Robotic devices for specialized imaging environments –Kiyo Chinzei is moving towards the direction of MR compatible micro-manipulators, and he talked about the ASTM F2503-2005 standard

Interactive Surgery and Surgical Assistant Systems was covered the following day, focusing on systems for telesurgery, microsurgery, and similar procedures:

• Human-machine cooperative systems – Greg Hager
• Robotic devices and systems for interactive surgery – Etienne Dombre
• Telesurgery – Blake Hannaford presented their raven system that was developed with a 1.2 M USD investment in 5 years with 6 people. Currently they are planning to build 7 pieces of the Raven 2.0 to distribute it to hospitals for further trials

Within the theme Practicalities, the unusual constraints that surround research in medical robotics and computer-integrated interventional medicine was discussed:

• Developing and validating clinical applications – Peter Kazanzides talked about the development of ROBODOC, and flip sides of engineering a medical product
• Systems, architectures and toolkits – Simon Dimaio on the da Vinci
  
• Registration / Navigation / Calibration – Noby Hata
• Blake Hannaford on tissue damage

Friday was devoted to tutorials:s

• Robotic Devices to Accommodate Surgeon and Tissue Motion – Cameron Riviere
• Sensing and information fusion – Guang-Zhang Yang who reported on their new development: eye-tracking built into the da Vinci. They got very high accuracy due to registration based on gaze.
• Medical Imaging modalities and techniques – Terry Peters
• Atlas-based CAS – Yoshinobu Sato
• Integration of Robotics and Biomedical Measurements for CAS – Ichiro Sakuma
• Haptics – Alison Okamura

In the afternoons, a special course of Hopkins' Surgery for Engineers program was held for the participants, led by Dr. Mike Marohn.
Student could also present their own work at the poster sessions before dinner. After the meals, there was still another talk to listen to, featuring James Handa on the I4M eye surgery project, Clif Burdette on medical product development procedures and Greg Hager on the language of surgery. At the end, a mini-symposium was held with over a dozen of short presentations on various CIS project. A special CIS late-birthday cake was also presented to Dr. Taylor, acknowledging his tireless efforts invested in the creation and direction of the ERC center.