Symposium on Surgical Robotics 2012

Speaker: Dr. Pierre E. Dupont, Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School

Invited Talk: Beating hearts and trembling hands: active and passive compensation of physiological motion for surgery

Speaker: Dr. Cameron N. Riviere, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Invited Talk: Optimal Planning for Robotics-Assisted Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery

Speaker: Dr. Rajni Patel, University of Western Ontario

Sunday Social Break: OPTIONAL TOUR OF CAMPUS BIO-MEDICO POLICLINICO/Research Lab
(for symposium participant only)

Invited Talk: Why 3D Ultrasound isn’t the Default Image Guidance Modality–and Why it Should Be

Speaker: Dr. Robert D. Howe, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University

Invited Talk: Towards Real-time Needle Path Control in Live MRI

Speaker: Dr. Gregory Fischer, AIM Lab, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Invited Talk: Robotics in general surgery: our first year experience.

Speaker: Dr. Roberto Coppola, General Surgery Department, Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome

Invited Talk: New Generation Robots for Endoluminal and Single Port Surgery

Speaker: Dr. Arianna Menciassi, The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna – Pisa (Italy)

PICK-UP TRANSFER TO DOWNTOWN

THE SYMPOSIUM ON SURGICAL ROBOTICS BANQUET (REGISTRATION)

Moderated by: Jaydev P. Desai

Speaker: Dr. J. Marc Simard, University of Maryland, School of Medicine

Speaker: Dr. Nabil Simaan, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University

Invited Talk: Proactive activities for a healthier society with intelligent medical robot based on physical model of human

Speaker: Dr. Masakatsu Fujie, Department of Modern Mechanical Engineering, Waseda University

Invited Talk: Quantitative Skill Assessment within an Augmented Reality Biopsy Simulator

Speaker: Dr. Venkat Krovi, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo

Invited Talk: Predicting Target Motion for Planning of Medical Interventions

Speaker: Dr. Sarthak Misra, Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine, University of Twente

Invited Talk: Needle insertion guidance: from adaptive motion planning to model-based control

Speaker: Dr. Philippe Poignet, University of Montpellier 2 – LIRMM

Invited Talk: Enabling Technologies for Robot-Assisted Endonasal Skull Base Surgery

Speaker: Dr. Robert J. Webster III, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University

Robotic surgery is a growing discipline that aims to overcome some limitations of current minimally invasive surgical procedures, by envisioning and developing new technological solutions. In the last years, efforts have been focused to enabling scar-less surgical procedures, while preserving the advantages of the open-surgery scenario. In this framework, we are assisting at a merging between endoscopic surgery and minimally invasive surgery, with the development of new robots that share common features in the attempt to make a step forward in targeted and effective therapeutic procedures.

In this talk, the speaker will present recent developments as regards endoscopic capsules with diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities, a novel robotic platform for single port laparoscopic bimanual surgery, and a set of instrumentation and technologies for natural orifices transluminal surgery.

Starting from the above scenario, this talk will finally discuss the combination of external robotic strategies and micro-nano-technologies, by introducing a preliminary platform for vascular plaque targeting, based on magnetic dragging and ultrasound tracking.

Arianna Menciassi obtained the M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Pisa in 1995 and the Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA) in 1999. She became Associate Professor of Industrial Bioengineering in 2006, at SSSA. Currently, she is with The BioRobotics Institute and she is Area Leader of “Surgical Robotics”.

Prof. Menciassi teaches at the SSSA and the Pisa University. She carries on an intense research and training activity at high level (master candidates in biomedical engineering, PhD students, etc.). Her main research interests involve biomedical robotics, microsystem technology, nanotechnology and micromechatronics, with a special attention to the synergy between robot-assisted therapy and microtechnology-related solutions. She is co-author of more than 200 scientific publications (more than 120 on ISI journals) and 6 book chapters on biomedical robots/devices and microtechnology. She serves in the Editorial Board of the IEEE-ASME Trans. on Mechatronics; she is Co-Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Surgical Robotics. In the year 2007, she received the Well-tech Award (Milan, Italy) for her researches on endoscopic capsules, and she was awarded by the Tuscany Region with the Gonfalone D’Argento, as one of the best 10 young talents of the region. From April 2010 she is affiliated member of the Center for MicroBioRobotics of IIT@SSSA (http://mbr.iit.it/).

Much of the research in the Surgical Mechatronics Laboratory of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon involves active and passive robotic compensation of physiological motion for surgical accuracy enhancement.

The goal of enhancing accuracy in microsurgery while also minimizing cost and maximizing ease of use has motivated the development of a fully handheld instrument, known as Micron, which senses its own motion, estimates the undesired component of its movement, and active compensates by deflecting its tip to oppose the undesired component. Feedback sensing for control is provided by a purpose-built frequency-multiplexed optical tracker that provides six-degree-of-freedom tracking with noise of several microns at 2 kHz sampling. Actuation in a 3-DOF prototype is accomplished using piezoelectric benders, and in a new 6-DOF prototype using ultrasonic linear motors. To enable vision-based control modes, the system is augmented with a stereo pair of cameras that view the workspace through the operating microscope. The talk will describe the design and operation of Micron, and will present experimental results from a variety of control modes including visual servoing and semi-automated scanning pattern generation.

Passive compensation is the approach followed by HeartLander, an intrapericardial crawling robot that performs passive compensation of heartbeat and respiratory motion during minimally invasive surgery. The crawler adheres to the epicardium using suction, and moves via inchworm-like crawling, driven by flexible push-wires connected to motors outside the patient. Recent results with the system will be presented, including improving locomotion efficiency via synchronization with heartbeat and respiration, particle filtering for accurate localization on the beating heart, and technologies for treatment by myocardial injection.

Cameron Riviere received the Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from The Johns Hopkins University in 1995, and joined the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University the same year. He is presently Associate Research Professor of Robotics, Biomedical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering, and the Director of the Surgical Mechatronics Laboratory in the Robotics Institute. Since 1998 he has also been Adjunct Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology at the University of Pittsburgh. He was one of the guest editors of the special issue on medical robotics in the journal Proceedings of the IEEE in 2006. His research interests include medical robotics, control systems, signal processing, and biomedical applications of human-machine interfaces.

Image-guided surgery (IGS) enables interventional procedures with greater precision and superior outcomes due to integration of medical imaging with the surgical workflow. However, traditional IGS typically relies on previously acquired images, while intra-operative imaging enables “closed-loop medicine” by providing a feedback pathway. MRI is an ideal guidance modality with the ability to perform high quality, volumetric, real-time, multi-parametric imaging with high soft tissue contrast without ionizing radiation. Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery offers significant advantages over manual approaches in applications requiring high accuracy and high reliability. Recently, considerable efforts have also been expended for needle-based percutaneous interventions utilizing different imaging modalities. We have developed a modular approach to MRI-compatible robotics including the software, control hardware and mechanical systems for rapid development and deployment of interventional systems. We further have developed and demonstrated integrated systems for active control of the needle insertion path while acquiring real-time MR images based upon both asymmetric tip-based needle steering and concentric tube active cannula approaches. This talk will focus on the development of an integrated system combining MRI-compatible robotics, real-time MR imaging with active scan plane control, teleoperated needle insertion, and active control of the needle trajectory.

Gregory Fischer is a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Engineering with an appointment in Biomedical Engineering. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in Mechanical Engineering in 2008 and an MS in Electrical Engineering in 2005, where he was part of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Computer Integrated Surgery (ERC-CISST). Dr. Fischers’s primary research focus is on developing enabling technologies for MR-guided surgical interventions including fiber optic sensors, piezoelectric and pneumatic actuators, haptics and teleoperation, modular robot control systems and application testbeds. Clinical applications of the research include MR image-guided prostate cancer diagnosis and therapy, and stereotactic neurosurgery for Parkinson’s and cancer treatment. He is the director of the WPI Automation and Interventional Medicine (AIM) Robotics Research Laboratory (http://aimlab.wpi.edu).

Facing an elderly dominated society, Robot Technology (RT) is expected to play an important role in medical areas. In our group, we work in close cooperation with medical institutions since 1970. It is important for robot control to use mechanical properties of human body, such as material mechanics, dynamics, thermo dynamics and fluid dynamics. Therefore, we have developed medical robots which are controlled using this information, such as soft tissue rigidity, organ thermal conductivity or blood flow rate in tissue. This means, that we transform knowledge acquired by the surgeons through experience into mechanical quantitative properties. Mechanical engineering is a crucially important area to promote collaboration between medical and engineering fields.

For example, we have been developed a palpation-based needle insertion robot for breast cancer and a surgical robot with vision field control for Single Port endoscopic Surgery (SPS). The control method of the needle insertion robot is based on material mechanics and breast tissue rigidity. We examined the insertion accuracy of this needle insertion robot not only with in vitro experiments, but also with in vivo experiments in association with physicians. Palpation-based needle insertion had a smaller error than traditional methods of breast needle insertion.

Recently, robotics systems are focused on assisting in SPS procedures. However, the existing systems require manual operation of vision field and endoscope position, hindering the surgical task. We proposed a surgical endoscopic robot for SPS with dynamic vision control, the endoscopic view being manipulated by a master controller. The prototype robot consists of a manipulator for vision control, and a dual tool tissue manipulator (gripping: 5DOFs, cautery: 3DOFs) that can be attached at the tip of the manipulator. We showed experimentally that this vision control and cautery task could be effectively achieved.

I will show some surgical robotics including the system mentioned above in this presentation. I believe that, through these proactive activities we can make a healthier society.

From 1971 to 2000, Prof. Fujie was with the Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory, Hitachi Ltd., where he was Senior Researcher from 1984 and became Principal Researcher and Project Leader for the Medical and Welfare Apparatus Development Project from 1995. He was also Head of Researchers in the Mechanical Engineering Research Laboratory, Hitachi Ltd., and the Director of the Medical and Welfare Apparatus Development Research Laboratory from 1999. Since 2001, he has been Professor with the Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, where he is the director of the Global Robot Academia for the Ministry Education Culture, Sport, Science and Technology “Global COE” Program. His current research interests include surgical robots, image-guided surgery, endoscopic surgery, assistive and rehabilitation robots. Currently, he is engaged in research collaborations with surgeon from various medical departments, such as gastroenterological surgery, thoracic surgery, and pediatric surgery.

Surgical robots augment capabilities of surgeons via seamless coupling of information with improved intra-operative action. Current surgical systems fail to address the challenges of deep or partially constrained surgical fields such as the throat, the inner ear, or the eye. This deficiency is exacerbated when surgeons try to use existing robotic systems for new surgical paradigms such as natural orifice surgery, or single port surgery. In addition to limited dexterity surgeons are hampered my sensory deficiency and the requirement to control a large number of degrees of freedom while safeguarding against trauma to the patient.

This talk will focus on our efforts in designing and controlling intelligent surgical telemanipulation slaves. We define an intelligent surgical slave as a robot capable of sensing the environment and using sensed information to assist the surgeon in performing surgical subtasks. We will first describe our modeling framework using screw theory for estimating forces of interaction with the environment. The talk will also describe recent results on the design and control of continuum robots capable of performing contact detection and localization. Finally, we will describe our design of a novel compliant motion control algorithm for multi-segment continuum robots and present resent experimental results and motivation. Time permitting; we will also describe assistive telemanipulation frameworks for micro-stent deployment and for cochlear implant insertion.

Dr. Nabil Simaan received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in 2002. His Masters and Ph.D. research focused on the design, synthesis, and singularity analysis of parallel robots for medical applications, stiffness synthesis, and modulation for parallel robots with actuation and kinematic redundancies. His Graduate advisor was Professor Moshe Shoham. In 2003, he was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (ERC-CISST), where he focused on minimally invasive robotic assistance in confined spaces under the supervision of Professor Russell H. Taylor. In 2005, he joined Columbia University, New York, NY, as an Assistant Professor of mechanical engineering and the Director of the Advanced Robotics and Mechanisms Applications (ARMA) Laboratory. In 2009 he received the NSF Career award for young investigators to design new algorithms and robots for safe interaction with the anatomy.?He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010 and he subsequently joined Vanderbilt University. In 2012 he received a secondary appointment in Vanderbilt’s department of Otolaryngology.

His research interests include design and control of novel robotic systems such as parallel robots, continuum snake-like robots, and flexible under-actuated robots for surgical assistance in MIS, Less Invasive Surgery (LIS), and Natural Orifice Trans-luminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES). His active funded research is on robotic assistance for dexterous bi-manual ophthalmic microsurgery, Cochlear Implant surgery, single port access (SPA), and automation for high-throughput biodosimetry.

Needles capable of active steering during their insertion have been designed to expand the applicability of percutaneous procedures. These needles use their flexibility and their shape to allow curved trajectories that could be exploited to avoid sensitive or impenetrable areas inaccessible with conventional rigid needles. Motion planning and control of such needles is a complex task and its difficulty increases as we consider the presence of uncertainties due to errors in tip positioning, needle modeling, tissue inhomogeneity, deformation or physiological motion. Thus, the need of developing a robotic system capable of compensating for such effects. In this talk, we will present an adaptive motion planning approach for semi-automatic insertion of needles using a robotic manipulator and some results of model-based force control.

Philippe Poignet received the M.E and Ph.D. degrees in control engineering from the University of Nantes, Nantes, France, in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He is currently Full Professor at the University of Montpellier 2 doing his research at the LIRMM laboratory and he is the head of the Robotics department. His research interests include robot identification, nonlinear control and the applications to medical robotics and rehabilitation. He has been or is involved in several national and European projects focusing on medical robotics and has co-authored over 60 peer reviewed publications. He is also co-organizer of the European Summer Schools in Surgical Robotics since 2003.

Image-guided minimally invasive surgery has revolutionized the standard of care throughout the body. The use of catheters in cardiology, for example, has substantially reduced the risk and trauma for the patient in comparison to open-heart surgery. Many intracardiac repairs, however, require manipulating tissue in ways that cannot be achieved by catheters and so still require open surgery. In this talk, I will describe a robotic technology and surgical tool set that my group is developing to convert these intracardiac repairs to percutaneous, beating-heart interventions. The robotic technology is based on concentrically combining pre-curved elastic tubes. Coordinated motorized control of individual tube rotations and translations enables the robot to be navigated through the vasculature and into the heart. Once the surgical site is reached, the distal sections of the robot can deploy and manipulate tools to perform the repair. The robot forms a slender curve comparable in cross section to a catheter, but with a substantially higher tip stiffness. We have developed tools for the fundamental surgical tasks of tissue removal and tissue approximation. Our surgical tools are manufactured using a metal MEMS process that produces fully assembled, millimeter-scale devices with micron-scale features. The potential of these technologies as well as our current challenges will be illustrated through ex vivo and in vivo experimental results.

Pierre E. Dupont is Chief of Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering and holder of the Edward P. Marram Chair at Children’s Hospital Boston. His academic appointments include Visiting Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. His research group develops robotic instrumentation and imaging technology for minimally invasive surgery. He received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA. After graduation, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. He subsequently moved to Boston University, Boston, MA, USA where, until recently, he was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. His group received the 2010 King-Sun Fu Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics for their paper on concentric tube robot technology. He is an IEEE Fellow who has served in many capacities with the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Although efforts are being made to prevent heart disease, it continues to be one of the leading causes of death around the world. To address the associated high cost and morbidity rates, scientists have been studying ways to reduce the invasiveness of heart surgeries by minimizing incision size and performing surgery on the beating heart. In Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), the instruments and a camera enter the body through small incisions (called ports). This approach has been shown to reduce patient recovery time, length of hospital stay and morbidity rates.

The difficulties created by the reduced access conditions in MIS have been addressed by the development of remotely controlled robotic manipulators such as the da Vinci? surgical system from Intuitive Surgical Inc. Although the use of this technology continues to progress rapidly, improper planning of a minimally invasive cardiac procedure can require conversion to open surgery, increasing the probability of cardiovascular events, morbidity and mortality. To address these issues, our research has focused on the following areas: (i) patient-specific models of the thorax that reflect intraoperative conditions; (ii) a graphics-based simulation environment for the surgical robot; (iii) patient selection measures and robot workspace optimization for minimally invasive cardiac surgery; and (iv) performance measures for minimally invasive surgical robots and their use in determining the placement of ports. These elements form part of a surgical planning system, an important goal of which is to reduce surgical times and the number of conversions to open surgery caused by poor access or reduced dexterity.

In our research, two optimization-based approaches have been developed that enable consideration of uncertainties in preoperative data and surgical tasks while optimizing qualities such as dexterity, reachability, tool approach angles and maneuverability. The efficacy of the formulations is demonstrated by comparing the computed results with actual outcomes of cardiac procedures performed by an experienced cardiac surgeon for several case studies.

Rajni Patel received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cambridge, England, in 1973 and currently holds the position of Distinguished University Professor and Tier-1 Canada Research Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a cross appointment in the Department of Surgery in the Schulich School Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Dr. Patel also serves as Director of Engineering for Canadian Surgical Technologies & Advanced Robotics (CSTAR). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the ASME, the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, and the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery.

Three Dimensional ultrasound (3DUS) offers many potential advantages for guiding surgical minimally invasive procedures. Compared to MR and CT imaging, 3DUS is fast: it produces full volumetric images up to 30 times per second, and does not require working inside the confines of a scanner bore. Unlike fluoroscopy and CT imaging, 3DUS does not expose the patient and clinicians to ionizing radiation, and it allows direct visualization of soft tissues. Equipment costs are also far lower than competing imaging modalities. Yet despite these benefits, 3DUS is rarely used for guidance. Reasons include low image quality, distortion from rigid instruments, and small field of view. This presentation will describe how these limitations can be overcome through the use of real-time image processing and visualization techniques, enabled by recent progress in graphics processor hardware and parallel software implementations. These techniques make it feasible to extract pertinent information from noisy images and combine it with other sensing modalities to overcome many of the limitations of 3DUS. This information can then be presented to the surgeon for manual guidance, and to robot systems for visual servoing. The results promise to increase the safety and efficacy of current image guided procedures and enable new applications.

Robert D. Howe is Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Dr. Howe founded the Harvard BioRobotics Laboratory in 1990, which investigates the roles of sensing and mechanical design in motor control, in both humans and robots. His research interests focus on manipulation, the sense of touch, and human-machine interfaces. Biomedical applications of this work include the development of robotic and image-guided approaches to minimally invasive surgical procedures. Dr. Howe earned a bachelors degree in physics from Reed College, then worked as a design engineer in the electronics industry in Silicon Valley. He received a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1990, and then joined the faculty at Harvard. Among his honors are the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, Fellow of the IEEE and AIMBE, and Best Paper Awards at mechanical engineering, robotics, and surgery conferences.

1 in 5 people will have a pituitary tumor at some point in their lives, and 1 in 120 of these will grow large enough (>1cm) to require surgery. Traditional surgery requires cutting a large cavity into the patient’s face or forehead. The endonasal approach is much less traumatic, but can only be deployed in a small percentage of cases because of the challenge of manipulating multiple straight, rigid instruments through the highly constrained nostril opening. Toward extending the benefits of the endonasal approach to all pituitary tumor patients and enabling novel approaches to other skull base tumors, we are developing a teleoperated robotic system that deploys multiple needle-diameter, tentacle-like manipulators through a single nostril. These manipulators are concentric tube robots, which harness elasticity and precurvature to achieve dexterity. Creating a teleoperated surgical assistant system from them requires mechanics-based models, teleoperation methods, and image guidance. This talk will focus on the technologies required to create the robotic system, results of recent cadaver studies, and possible adaptations of various components of the system to alternate surgical applications.

Robert J. Webster III received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Clemson University in 2002, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 2004 and 2007. In 2008 he joined the mechanical engineering faculty of Vanderbilt University, where he currently directs the Medical & Electromechanical Design (MED) Laboratory. Prof. Webster’s research interests include medical robotics, image-guided surgery, and continuum robotics. He received the IEEE Volz award for greatest US Robotics PhD thesis impact on the field during the two years following its publication, and a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2011.

Robotic surgery is gaining more and more attention by the surgical community during the last years. Some international centers have already reached outstanding results using this new technology.

We have started our experience with the Da Vinci Robot one year ago. We have performed several type of operation following a very short learning curve.

Up to date, our first field of application is colorectal surgery and in this presentation we are going to discuss the advantages and the disadvantages of Robotic surgery comparing a prospective, non randomized series of our first 50 cases matched with laparoscopic surgery. There were no significant differences in oncological accuracy of the robotic operation compared to laparoscopic one as well as rate of complication. Robotic procedure is significantly longer and the economic impact is superior to laparoscopic surgery.

Roberto Coppola is full professor of general surgery at UCBM. He is specialist in Vascular Surgery and General surgery. He is the Director of the Specialty Schools in General Surgery and Urology. He is the supervisor of the Course on Systematic Medical-Surgical Pathology, professor of Surgical Clinic and several other courses in specialty schools. Roberto Coppola is an eminent expert general surgeon with a major experience in oncologic surgery and laparoscopic surgery. His operative curriculum includes over 4000 high and medium surgical procedures. He authored or co-authored more than 250 papers focused on hepato-biliar-pancreatic and digestive surgery. He is Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and member of the Directive board of the Roman Society of Surgery.

Soft tissue displacements during minimally invasive surgical procedures may cause target motion and subsequent misplacement of the needle. This talk presents techniques to predict target motion by combining ultrasound-based soft-tissue elasticity estimation techniques and finite element (FE) modeling. Phantoms with targets are manufactured and subjected to varying loading and boundary conditions. Ultrasound images are acquired using a 2D/3D probe during loading of each phantom, and subsequently target motion is calculated. Soft-tissue properties are estimated using elastography and ultrasound-based acoustic radiation force impulse imaging technique. FE models of the phantoms are developed, and they are used to predict target displacement. Such models could be used to develop patient-specific plans for surgical interventions.

Sarthak Misra is an Associate Professor at the University of Twente, Netherlands. He is a member of the Control Engineering Group and affiliated with MIRA-Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine. Sarthak obtained his doctoral degree in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University, USA. Prior to commencing his studies at Johns Hopkins, he worked for three years as a dynamics and controls analyst at MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates on the International Space Station Program. Sarthak received his Master of Engineering degree in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University, Canada. He is the recipient of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) VENI award, Link Foundation fellowship, McGill Major fellowship, and NASA Space Flight Awareness award. Sarthak’s broad research interests are primarily in the area of applied mechanics at both macro and micro scales. He is interested in the modeling and control of electro-mechanical systems with applications to medical robotics.

Percutaneous needle biopsies remain the gold standard to find abnormal cells (e.g. cancers), investigate symptoms (e.g. ulcers, hepatitis, kidney disease or endometriosis), inflammation or assess the health of internal organs such as kidney, liver, and bone. To date, clinicians are trained in this highly critical procedure only by conducting biopsies on live patients under supervision in the vaunted “see one, do one, and teach one” training philosophy. Anatomical landmarks guide placement of the biopsy needles and physicians conducting the biopsies are expected to attain a sense of “feel” as the needle encounters the different tissues. However, the time and expense involved and the unpredictable availability of subjects (patients) needing the particular biopsy results in inadequately trained practitioners, who then often go on to poorly train others.

The sheer number of biopsies performed and the variety of clinical specialties performing these procedures argue compellingly for a more comprehensive, quantitative, computer-based training, testing, and certification regimen for resident training. Our primary focus therefore has been on developing an Augmented Reality Simulation of Needle Biopsies (AR-SimBiopsies) to provide uniform, consistent and quantitative training platform for medical professionals of all stripes. Limitations in visual and haptic technologies, lack of suitable assessment metrics, and, most importantly, lack of accreditation/validation/ certification of these methodologies plague contemporary medical simulators. In seeking to overcome these limitations, our framework facilitates a flexible choice between physical- as well as virtual-biopsy testing scenarios while our assessment methods build upon transparent quantitative motion- and force-capture of users’ performance. We are also making inroads into task-segmentation based methods of needle-insertion procedures with an eye towards automated skill recognition. Both aspects are being studied in longitudinal skill-improvement subject studies with cadaveric-models, physical-phantoms and virtual-environments.

Prof. Venkat Krovi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the director of Automation, Robotics and Mechatronics (ARM) Laboratory at the University at Buffalo (UB), State University of New York. He received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998.

His research interests are in the lifecycle treatment (design, modeling, analysis, control, implementation and verification) of novel robotic and mechatronic systems, with emphasis on both theoretical formulation and experimental validation. The underlying research theme has been to take advantage of the “power of the many” to unlock new opportunities in various plant-automation, automobile, defense and healthcare/surgical applications. The principal opportunities lie in building upon heterogeneous loosely-interconnected physical- and information-systems and architecting high-confidence and reconfigurable operational capabilities in the presence of uncertainties.

His work has been funded by NSF, DARPA, ARO as well as numerous state and industrial grants and has received multiple awards, including the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award, several best poster, conference and journal paper awards. His work has been published in more than 90 journal/conference articles, book chapters and patents.

He has served as an Associate Editor of ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement and Control and a Technical editor of IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics and an active organizing committee member for many ASME and IEEE conferences. Within ASME, he has served as the Conference Chair of the 2010 ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Conference and is slated to serve as General Chair of the 2014 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences. Within IEEE, he has served as the Finance Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE10), the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA10, ICRA12), and serves on the Conference Activities Board and Industrial Activities Board of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.