Seminar talk at Hopkins

I was offered the unique chance and honor to give this week's ERC/LCSR seminar talk at Hopkins. You can access the full presentation here. My talk summarized three research projects I was mostly working on towards my PhD:

•  Stochastic method for error propagation: In certain critical surgical procedures, physicians extensively rely on the help of navigation systems, with accuracy metrics provided by the manufacturers. Depending on the setup, inherent system errors can accumulate and lead to significant deviation in position. It is crucial to determine and display the overall task execution error-the registration and tracking errors enlarged by multiplying imperfect homogeneous transformations. The stochastic approach presented offers an easy and straightforward solution to map and scale the error propagation. 
•  Detection and compensation of intraoperative motion: One of the major challenges with integrated surgical robot systems is to maintain the accuracy of the pre-operative registration procedures, and to ensure that all motions of the hardware setup or patient are promptly noticed. By applying a deterministic approach (similar to behavior-based control), it becomes possible to accurately monitor and compensate for any spatial changes with a selective algorithm. The concept developed was tested on a neurosurgical prototype system built at the CISST ERC at the Johns Hopkins University. The new technique can be used with various image-guided systems, offering new ways to enhance their capabilities. 
• Control architecture for telesurgery: Error compensation and guidance of surgical devices are gaining importance in the evolving field of long distance telesurgery. Effective control requires the appropriate handling of the latency in the communication, while ensuring the stability of the devices. A control structure was designed and tested in simulations for telesurgery, relying on empirical controller design methods.