EMBC minisymposium

I was happy to sign up for the minisymposium held at this year’s EMBC conference on Surgical Robotics--Image-Guided Robotized Surgery, officially organized by Philippe Poignet and colleagues from Montpellier LIRMM.
The program included the following talks:

• An Ingestible Wireless Capsule for Treatment of Obesity
• Motion Generation of Robotic Surgical Tasks: Learning from Expert Demonstrations
• Robotic-Surgical Instrument Wrist Pose Estimation
• Virtual Environment to Evaluate Multimodal Feedback Strategies for Augmented Navigation of the Visually Impaired
• Design of a Surgical Robot with Dynamic Vision Control for Single Port Endoscopic Surgery
• Stochastic Approach to Error Estimation for Image-Guided Robotic Systems (I will cover my talk in a later post.)
  

The previous day I took some lectures on medical technology from well experienced veterans at the "Practical lessons learned from medical devices and systems development" workshop. Some quotable quotes from Dr. Kroll (recipient of this year's EMBS Professional career award):

• “In medical device development, drugs are your real competitors.”
• “To get lucrative, develop health care solutions for mid-aged men, they are the business angels.”
• “Death is the cheapest cure.”
• “Minor surgery is when your friend is having an operation.”
• “The golden rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules!”
• “By the time your product is perfect, it’s obsolete.”

/Dr. Mark Kroll/

• “In medical device industry do not guess! The price for being wrong is high.”

/Dr. Xuan Kong/