Exhibition at MICCAI

MICCAI2009 featured an impressive exhibition with many CIS related products and projects.
- The first public appearance of the RoboCast system was here. It is an EU funded IG neurosurgical robot system, currently consisting of a PathFinder and a SpineAssist.
- Intuitive Surgical brought over a da Vinci S system, unfortunately not the HD version. The da Vinci was open to play with, and also served to demonstrate the cool stuff of the SAW architecture developed by the Hopkins people. Through video overlay many functions are available in the virtual environment of the surgeon's viewer, such as landmark positioning, distance measurement pre-op image overlay and so on.
- Hopkins also brought a mock surgical system consisting of 4 teleoperatable Omnis and a simple 3D viewer.
- Hansen Medical demonstrated its new heart ablation robot that got a very impressive haptic master console. A previous article about the system.
- Qatar recently announced its aim to become an international leader in robot assisted technologies. They offer fellowship for renown professionals to join there new Qatar Robotic Surgery Centre that was created with a mere 65M USD investment. It will begin operations in 2010 with 3 da Vincis immediately.
- Major IGS technology provider NDI was also present with some experimental generator and probe design for EM tracking.
- The small brother, Claron, also brought its more affordable solutions.
- Tobii was built on innovative eye tracking technology, also showing some surgical demos.

- There were many companies advertising haptic systems along with high performance 3D visualization for education and demonstration. It's worth mentioning SenseGraphics open source haptic system development toolkit.