ICRA WS on Medical Cyber-Physical Systems

At the annual ICRA conferences, there is more and more emphasis put on surgical technologies. This year, many sessions and presentations dealt with the topic. An outstanding program was the Workshop on Medical Cyber-Physical Systems, organized by Blake Hannaford and Ron Alterovitz.
“The goal of the workshop was to expose and explore current research issues in advanced medical systems in which computation is intimately coupled to physical systems and humans. The integration of computation with physical systems has the potential to improve speed, precision, and dexterity during robot-assisted surgery as well as enable new medical procedures. It focused on both computation to improve the planning, control, and effectiveness of these systems as well as new devices and hardware that enable more dexterity and better sensing.” The impressive list of lecturers together with the abstracts can be found on the workshop’s website.
Theme 1: Surgical Systems

• Russel H. Taylor, Johns Hopkins University, USA
• M. Cenk Cavusoglu, Case Western Reserve University, USA
• Jacob Rosen, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
• Robert Howe, Harvard University, USA

Theme 2: Modeling and Planning Medical Procedures

• Ron Alterovitz, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
• Ganesh Sankaranarayanan, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
• Gregory D. Hager, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Theme 3: Sensor Feedback and Human Interfaces

• Paul Griffiths and Allison Okamura, Johns Hopkins University, USA
• Kenji Kawashima, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
• Jaydev Desai, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
• Mamoru Mitsuishi, The University of Tokyo, Japan

Theme 4: Automation of Surgical Tasks

• Howard Chizeck, University of Washington, USA
• Pieter Abbeel, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Theme 5: From the Lab to the Clinic

• Simon DiMaio, Intuitive Surgical, USA