ICRA WS on Snakes, Worms and Catheters

Continuum robots probably represent the most quickly advancing field of surgical robotics. This year, at IEEE ICRA, beyond the many general talks addressing related research, a full day workshop was organized--Snakes, Worms and Catheters: Continuum and Serpentine Robots for Minimally Invasive Surgery --with invited lectures from the most prominent labs:

• David Camarillo, Hansen Medical - Control of Robotic Catheters for Cardiac Ablation
• Howie Choset, Carnegie Mellon University - Enabling Medical Robotics for the Next Generation of Minimally Invasive Procedures
• Pierre Dupont, Children’s Hospital Boston, HMS - Concentric Tube Robots – from Lab Bench to Operating Room
• Koji Ikuta, Nagoya University - From SMA Active Endoscope to Micro Catheter
• Joseph Madsen, MD, Children’s Hospital, Harvard Med - Evolution of the Surgical Robot: the Case for Slithering
• Mohsen Mahvash, Children’s Hospital Boston, HMS - Active Stiffness Control of Surgical Continuum Robots
• Rajni Patel, University of Western Ontario - Robot-Assisted Active Catheter Control
• Cameron Riviere, Carnegie Mellon University - HeartLander: an Epicardial Crawling Robot for Beating-Heart Surgery
• Nabil Simaan, Columbia University - Robotic Technologies for NOTES, Single Port Access Surgery, and Minimally Invasive Surgery in Confined Spaces
• Neal Tanner, Hansen Medical - Robotic Catheter-based Minimally Invasive Procedures: The Sensei X Case Study
• Russell Taylor, Johns Hopkins University - A Perspective on Flexible Robots for MIS
• Robert Webster, Vanderbilt University - Modeling, shape sensing, image guidance, and therapeutic applicator integration: Enabling technologies for clinical continuum robots
• Guang-Zhong Yang, Imperial College - Realtime in situ in vivo surgical sensing and imaging

In addition, several posters were on exhibit. The proceedings of the workshop is available for download (both the abstracts for the presentations and the posters).

Related news is that a new catheter guiding robot has made it to clinical use (from Catheter Robotics Inc). Read more about it at MedGadget.

Also, CardioArm, the snake robot from Cardiorobotics is planned to get through preliminary clinical trials by this time.