Team presentations at IJCAI 2023

Congratulations to the following members for the presentations at  IJCAI2023 Macau, IJCAI2023 Symposium on Multimodal Reasoning – Techniques, Applications, and Challenges:

Multimodal Reasoning and Language Prompting for Interactive Learning Assistant for Robotic Surgery. Gokul Kannan, Lalithkumar Seenivasan, Hongliang Ren
IJCAI-2023 Symposium Session on Medical Large Models
Talk by Dr. Ren: Surgical motion understanding and generation towards intelligent minimally invasive robotic procedures

6 papers presented at MICCAI2023

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations to the following members for the papers accepted and presented by MICCAI2023:

Revisiting distillation for continual learning on visual question localized-answering in robotic surgery

 

L Bai, M Islam, H Ren*

Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2023

Rectifying noisy labels with sequential prior: multi-scale temporal feature affinity learning for robust video segmentation

 

B Cui, M Zhang, M Xu, A Wang, W Yuan*, H Ren*

Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2023

Co-attention gated vision-language embedding for visual question localized-answering in robotic surgery

 

L Bai, M Islam, H Ren*

Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2023

LLCaps: learning to illuminate low-light capsule endoscopy with curved wavelet attention and reverse diffusion

 

L Bai, T Chen, Y Wu, A Wang, M Islam, H Ren*

Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2023

S2ME: Spatial-Spectral Mutual Teaching and Ensemble Learning for Scribble-supervised Polyp Segmentation

 

A Wang, M Xu, Y Zhang, M Islam, H Ren*

arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.00451, MICCAI2023

SurgicalGPT: End-to-End Language-Vision GPT for visual question answering in surgery

 

L Seenivasan, M Islam, G Kannan, H Ren*

arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.09974, MICCAI2023

Also congrats on Lalith’s award for best MICCAI reviewer & Andy’s workshop presentation

Team presentations and award at ICRA2023

Congratulations to the following members for the papers accepted by ICRA2023 and presentations at  ICRA2023:

Surgical-VQLA: transformer with gated vision-language embedding for visual question localized-answering in robotic surgery

L Bai, M Islam, L Seenivasan, H Ren*

arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.11692, ICRA 2023

Rethinking Feature Extraction: Gradient-Based Localized Feature Extraction for End-To-End Surgical Downstream Tasks

W Pang, M Islam, S Mitheran, L Seenivasan, M Xu, H Ren
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 7 (4), 12623-12630
Congratulations on the excellent work done and poster award in ICRA workshop New Evolutions in Surgical Robotics: Embracing Multimodal Imaging Guidance, Intelligence, and Bio-inspired Mechanisms held at ICRA 2023.
  • Domain Adaptive Sim-to-Real Segmentation of Oropharyngeal Organs Towards Robot-assisted Intubation, Guankun Wang, Tian-Ao Ren, Jiewen Lai, Long Bai, and Hongliang Ren
  • Relational Reasoning in VQA Models for Visual Question Answering in Robotic Surgery, Lalithkumar and Hongliang Ren

3 papers accepted by MICCAI2022

Congratulations to the following members for the papers accepted by MICCAI2022:

  • An et al Rethinking Surgical Instrument Segmentation: A Background Image Can Be All You Need
  • Lalith et al Surgical-VQA: Visual Question Answering in Surgical Scenes using Transformer
  • Mengya et al Rethinking Surgical Captioning: End-to-End Window-Based MLP Transformer Using Patches

 

Team presentations at ICRA2022

Congratulations to the following members for the 3 papers accepted by ICRA2022 and presentations at  ICRA2022:

Godwin: Chip-Less Real-Time Wireless Sensing of Endotracheal Intubation Tubes by Printing and Mounting Conformable Antenna Tag 

Lalith: Global-Reasoned Multi-Task Learning Model for Surgical Scene Understanding

Ling: SIRNet: Fine-Grained Surgical Interaction Recognition

Godwin and Lalith are presenting at ICRA on site this year:
https://www.icra2022.org/

Team presentations at pre-ICRA2021

Congratulations to the following members for the papers accepted by ICRA2021 and presentations at pre-ICRA2021:

Menya Learning Domain Adaptation with Model Calibration for Surgical Report Generation in Robotic Surgery https://youtu.be/Eu-ryJ9OyTM
Godwin Chip-Less Wireless Sensing of Origami Structural Morphing under Various Mechanical Stimuli Using Home-Based Ink-Jet Printable Materials https://youtu.be/HXgW2S21OGI
Huxin Remote-Center-Of-Motion Recommendation Toward Brain Needle Intervention Using Deep Reinforcement Learning https://youtu.be/Py5Vw_hQryY
Bok Seng Origami-Inspired Snap-Through Bistability in Parallel and Curved Mechanisms through the Inflection of Degree Four Vertexes https://youtu.be/mCBPTVw5_kw
Changsheng A Miniature Manipulator with Variable Stiffness towards Minimally Invasive Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery https://youtu.be/b_zW9MHgG5g
Ruphan Multiphysics Simulation of Magnetically Actuated Robotic Origami Worms  https://youtu.be/UCkLuhoN0ME

7 papers accepted by ICRA2021 including 2 concurrently by RA-L

Congratulations to the following members for the papers accepted by ICRA2021 including 2 concurrently by RA-L:

Xiao et al Magnetically-Connected Modular Reconfigurable Mini-Robotic System with Bilateral Isokinematic Mapping and Fast On-Site Assembly towards Minimally Invasive Procedures https://youtu.be/V1N2OiN43vw (Talk)  https://youtu.be/PNneXuRXgZI (Demo)
Menya Learning Domain Adaptation with Model Calibration for Surgical Report Generation in Robotic Surgery https://youtu.be/Eu-ryJ9OyTM
Godwin Chip-Less Wireless Sensing of Origami Structural Morphing under Various Mechanical Stimuli Using Home-Based Ink-Jet Printable Materials https://youtu.be/HXgW2S21OGI
Huxin Remote-Center-Of-Motion Recommendation Toward Brain Needle Intervention Using Deep Reinforcement Learning https://youtu.be/Py5Vw_hQryY
Bok Seng Origami-Inspired Snap-Through Bistability in Parallel and Curved Mechanisms through the Inflection of Degree Four Vertexes https://youtu.be/mCBPTVw5_kw
Changsheng A Miniature Manipulator with Variable Stiffness towards Minimally Invasive Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery https://youtu.be/b_zW9MHgG5g
Ruphan Multiphysics Simulation of Magnetically Actuated Robotic Origami Worms  https://youtu.be/UCkLuhoN0ME

ICBME 2019 Special Symposium in Surgical Robotics

Themes

  • Computer-Assisted Surgery
  • Flexible Robotics and navigation in Surgery
  • Artificial Intelligence in Robotic Surgery

Date: Dec 11, 2019, EA

Speakers and Topics

1600 – 1615 Robotic Intervention Utilizing Bioengineering Based Therapeutic Methods
Ichiro Sakuma University of Tokyo
1615 – 1630 Augmented Reality for Orthopeadic Surgery
Jaesung Hong Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology
1630 – 1645
Medical Robot Link Architecture Connected to Smart Cyber Operating Theater (SCOT)
Ken Masamune Tokyo Women’s Medical University
1645 – 1700
Transluminal Robotics with Delicate Continuum and Context Awareness
Hongliang Ren National University of Singapore
1700 – 1715
Robot-Assisted Interventions under Intra-Operative MRI-Based Guidance
Ka-Wai Kwok University of Hong Kong
1715 – 1730
Biomimetic Wrinkled MXene Pressure Sensors towards Collision-Aware Robots
Catherine Cai National University of Singapore


 

SAKUMA, Ichiro, University of Tokyo

  • Robotic Intervention Utilizing Bioengineering Based Therapeutic Methods
  • Biography
    Ichiro Sakuma received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in precision machinery engineering from the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, in 1982, 1984, and 1989, respectively. He was Research Associate (1987), Associate Professor (1991) at the Department of Applied Electronic Engineering, Tokyo Denki University, Saitama, Japan. He was research instructor at Department of Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas from 1990 to 1991. He was Associate Professor at Department of Precision Engineering (1998), Associate Professor (1999) and Professor (2001), Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He is currently a Professor at Department of Bioengineering, Department of Precision Engineering, Director of Medical Device Development and Regulation Research Center, and Vice dean, School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo. He is the immediate past president of Japanese Society for Medical and Biological Engineering (JSMBE) (2014-2016). He is also Deputy Director for Medical Devices, Center for Product Evaluation, Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA)His research interests includes 1) Computer Aided Surgery, 2) Medical Robotics and medical devise for minimally invasive therapy, 3) Analysis of cardiac arrhythmia phenomena and control of arrhythmia, and 4) Regulatory sciences for medical device development.He received various academic awards including, The Japan Society of Computer Aided Surgery, Best Paper Award (2006), Robotic Society of Japan, Best Paper Award (2010, 2015). In 2014, his group’s research was selected in 2014 as one of the most exciting peer-reviewed optics research to have emerged over the past 12 months by Photonics and Optics News (OSA)

 

Ken Masamune, Tokyo Women’s Medical University

  • Medical Robot Link Architecture Connected to Smart Cyber Operating Theater (SCOT)
  • Abstract
    Nowadays, several medical devices/systems including imaging machine, anesthesia, navigation system, biomonitoring devices, surgical bed, medical robots, et al., are installed in the operation room, however, it is unpleasant situation that all devices are performed in stand-alone mode, without time-synchronization, and it is difficult to combine/analyze some set of information from devices to make surgeon’s decision during surgery. To improve this situation, we’ve been developing an integrated operating room named “Smart Cyber Operating Theater (SCOT) with middleware ORiN system. In this presentation, we introduce a current SCOT project and the design concept of new open platform architecture for the integration of master/slave robotic devices and information guided robot especially for oral and maxillofacial surgery. This design will accelerate the development of any types of robotic interfaces/end effectors with fast validation.
  • Biography
    Ken Masamune received the Ph.D. degree in precision machinery engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1999. From 1995 to 1999, he was a Research Associate in the Department of Precision Machinery Engineering, the University of Tokyo. From 2000 to 2004, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biotechnology, Tokyo Denki University, Tokyo. Since 2005, he has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanoinformatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo. His current research interests include computer-aided surgery, especially medical robotics and visualization devices and systems for surgery.

 

Jaesung Hong, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology

  • AUGMENTED REALITY FOR SURGICAL NAVIGATION
  • Abstract
    In these days, augmented reality (AR) has become a key technology for surgical navigation. Using the AR technology, the shape of invisible organs are overlapped to the visible endoscopic or microscopic images. Therefore the surgeon can avoid damaging the healthy tissue, and reduce the incision area. In the AR-based surgery, optical tracker and camera are generally used. Optical tracker can measure the position and pose of multiple markers, and the relationship between the camera and target organs of patient can be measured in real-time by tracking of the markers which are mounted on the camera body and the patient. In the AR display, finding the relationship between the optical marker mounted on the camera body and the center of camera (camera registration) is particulary important. This relationship strongly affects the overall accuracy of AR display. In this talk, the latest AR technologies applied for the surgical navigation are introduced.
  • Biography
    Jaesung Hong is an associate professor and the Department Chair of Robotics Engineering at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), South Korea. His research area is medical imaging and medical robotics for minimally invasive surgery.
    At the University of Tokyo, he has developed the world first US-guided needle insertion robot tracking a movable and deformable organ. This was reported in Physics in Medicine and Biololgy in 2004, and has been frequently cited (> 160). While he worked at Kyushu University Hospital in Japan, he developed various customized surgical navigation systems, which were clinically applied in approximately 120 surgeries. These included percutaneous ablation therapies for liver tumors, cochlear implant surgeries, neurosurgeries for gliomas, and dental implant surgeries.
    After moving to DGIST which is a research-oriented special university supported by Korean government, he developed a single port surgery robot and its master device for high force transimisson and large workspace as well as a portable, AR-based surgical navigation system, which has been tested in tibia tumor resections and orthognathic surgeries in collaboration with major Korean hospitals, including the Seoul National University Hospital of Bundang, Samsung Seoul Hospital, etc. He is one of a small number of specialists who is familiar with both engineering and clinical medicine.
    Until 2016, Prof. Hong has published approximately 42 journal papers including 30 SCI/SCIE papers with impact factors. Six of them are top 10% ranked journal papers. He also submitted or registered 15 domestic and 7 international patents. He has received 9 best paper/presentation awards, in addition to obtaining 10 research funds amounting to approximately 4.5M USD (including planned budgets).

 

Ka-Wai Kwok, University of Hong Kong

  • Robot-Assisted Interventions under Intra-Operative MRI-Based Guidance
  • Abstract
    Advanced surgical robotics has attracted significant research interest in supporting image guidance, even magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for effective navigation of surgical instruments. In situ effective guidance of access routes to the target anatomy, rendered based on imaging data, can enable a distinct awareness of the position of robotic instrument tip relative to the target anatomy in various types of minimally invasive interventions. Therefore, such MRI-guided robots will rely on real-time processing the co-registration of surgical plan with the imaging data captured during the intervention, as well as computing the relative configuration between the instrument and the anatomy of surgical interest.
    This talk will present a compact robotic system capable to operate inside the bore of MRI scanner, as well as its solutions to technical challenges of providing a safe, effective catheter-based surgical manipulation. The proposed image processing system demonstrates its clinical potential of enhanced surgical safety by imposing visual feedback on tele-operated robotic instruments even under large-scale and rapid tissue deformations in soft tissue surgeries, such as cardiac electrophysiology and stereotactic neurosurgery. The ultimate research objective is to enable the operator to perform safe, precise and effective control of robotics instruments with the aid of pre- and intra-operative MRI models. The present work will be timely to bridge the current technical gap between MRI and surgical robotic control.
  • Biography
    Dr. Ka-Wai Kwok is currently assistant professor in Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, who completed his PhD training in The Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London in 2011, where he continued research on surgical robotics as a postdoctoral fellow. After then, Dr. Kwok obtained the Croucher Foundation Fellowship 2013-14, which supported his research jointly hosted by The University of Georgia, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital – Harvard Medical School. His research interests focus on surgical robotics, intra-operative medical image processing, and their uses of high-performance computing techniques. To date, he has been involved in various designs of surgical robotic devices and interfaces for endoscopy, laparoscopy, stereotactic and intra-cardiac catheter interventions. His work has also been recognized by several awards from IEEE international conferences, including ICRA’14, IROS’13 and FCCM’11. He also became the recipient of Early Career Awards 2015/16 offered by Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong.

 

Hongliang Ren, National University of Singapore, Singapore

  • Transluminal Robotics with Delicate Continuum and Context Awareness
  • Biography
    Dr. Hongliang Ren is currently an assistant professor and leading a research group on medical mechatronics in the Biomedical Engineering Department of National University of Singapore (NUS). He is an affiliated Principal Investigator for the Singapore Institute of Neurotechnology (SINAPSE) and Advanced Robotics Center at National University of Singapore. Dr. Ren received his PhD in Electronic Engineering (Specialized in Biomedical Engineering) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2008. After his graduation, he worked as a Research Fellow in the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) and the Engineering Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (ERC-CISST), Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Computer Science, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA, from 2008 to 2010. In 2010, he joined the Pediatric Cardiac Biorobotics Lab, Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Children’s Hospital Boston & Harvard Medical School, USA, for investigating the beating heart robotic surgery system. Prior to joining NUS, he also worked in 2012 on a collaborative computer integrated surgery project, at the Surgical Innovation Institute of Children’s National Medical Center, USA. His main areas of interest include Biomedical Mechatronics, Computer-Integrated Surgery, and Dynamic Positioning in Medicine.

 

Catherine Cai, National University of Singapore, Singapore

  • Biomimetic Wrinkled MXene Pressure Sensors towards Collision-Aware Robots
  • Abstract
    The use of surgical robots in the field of minimally invasive neurosurgical procedures can offer several benefits and advantages. However, the lack of force sensing hinders and limits their use in such procedures. Equipping surgical robots with pressure sensors can enhance robot-environment interaction by enabling collision awareness and enhance human-robot interactions by providing surgeons the necessary force feedback for safe tissue manipulation. With the emergence of soft robotics in biomedical applications, the attached pressure sensors are required to be flexible and stretchable in order to comply with the mechanically dynamic robotic movements and deformations. Inspired by the multi-dimensional wrinkles of Shar-Pei dog’s skin, we have fabricated a flexible and stretchable piezoresistive pressure sensor consisting of MXene electrodes with biomimetic topographies. This pressure sensor is found to be more sensitive in low-pressure regimes (0.934 kPa-1, <236 Pa), and less sensitive in the higher pressure regimes (0.188 kPa-1, <2070 Pa).

ICBME 2016 Special Symposium in surgical navigation and robotics

Themes

  • Computer-Assisted Surgery
  • Flexible Robotics and navigation in Surgery
  • Artificial Intelligence in Robotic Surgery

Date: Dec 7, 2016 U-Town

Gallery

https://goo.gl/photos/vCNqYfWmD26UF41j7
   
   

Speakers and Topics


sakuma

Keynote speaker: SAKUMA, Ichiro, University of Tokyo

  • COMPUTER AIDED SURGERY FOR ASSISTING MINIMALLY INVASIVE THERAPIES
  • Abstract
    Minimally invasive therapy such as endoscopic surgery and catheter based intervention are being spread in many surgical intervention fields. Thus engineering assistance is important to realize safe and effective minimally invasive therapy. Computer Assisted Surgical guidance such as surgical navigation is one of key technologies. It is expected that application of robotic technology to minimally invasive surgery will provide the following functions:
    (1) Precise manipulation of biological tissues and surgical instruments in narrow and confined surgical field.
    (2) Precise and accurate localization of therapeutic devices using various pre and intra-operative medical information.In the first mode of application, more compact system is required. It can be realized by introduction of novel mechanical design and application off a new mechanism as well as new materials. At the same time integration with various energy devices are also required. Intra-operative guidance utilizing various pre and intra operative information is necessary in the second mode of application. Image guided robotic system for RF ablation, laser ablation, intensity modified radiation therapy, and high intensity focused ultrasound. In this type of robot, various preand intraoperative information including functional information is used to navigate the therapeutic devices to the target lesion. Intra-operative identification of pathological state of the target tissue and evaluation of outcome after therapeutic intervention are also important.Factors limiting the application of surgical navigation systems and medical robotics include limited usability requiring additional procedures for preparation, and high costs. Recent progress of computer vision technologies will solve part of these issues.For wider spread of these technologies in clinical environment, further improvement of usability, cost reduction, and accumulation of clinical evidences demonstrating efficacy from both clinical and economical point of view are required.
  • Biography
    Ichiro Sakuma received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in precision machinery engineering from the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, in 1982, 1984, and 1989, respectively. He was Research Associate (1987), Associate Professor (1991) at the Department of Applied Electronic Engineering, Tokyo Denki University, Saitama, Japan. He was research instructor at Department of Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas from 1990 to 1991. He was Associate Professor at Department of Precision Engineering (1998), Associate Professor (1999) and Professor (2001), Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He is currently a Professor at Department of Bioengineering, Department of Precision Engineering, Director of Medical Device Development and Regulation Research Center, and Vice dean, School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo. He is the immediate past president of Japanese Society for Medical and Biological Engineering (JSMBE) (2014-2016). He is also Deputy Director for Medical Devices, Center for Product Evaluation, Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA)His research interests includes 1) Computer Aided Surgery, 2) Medical Robotics and medical devise for minimally invasive therapy, 3) Analysis of cardiac arrhythmia phenomena and control of arrhythmia, and 4) Regulatory sciences for medical device development.He received various academic awards including, The Japan Society of Computer Aided Surgery, Best Paper Award (2006), Robotic Society of Japan, Best Paper Award (2010, 2015). In 2014, his group’s research was selected in 2014 as one of the most exciting peer-reviewed optics research to have emerged over the past 12 months by Photonics and Optics News (OSA)

masamuneken

Ken Masamune, Tokyo Women’s Medical University

  • OPEN PLATFORM OF MEDICAL ROBOTS/ DEVICES WITH SMART CYBER OPERATING THEATER (SCOT): DESIGN CONCEPT AND PROTOTYPE ROBOT DEVELOPMENTS
  • Abstract
    Nowadays, several medical devices/systems including imaging machine, anesthesia, navigation system, biomonitoring devices, surgical bed, medical robots, et al., are installed in the operation room, however, it is unpleasant situation that all devices are performed in stand-alone mode, without time-synchronization, and it is difficult to combine/analyze some set of information from devices to make surgeon’s decision during surgery. To improve this situation, we’ve been developing an integrated operating room named “Smart Cyber Operating Theater (SCOT) with middleware ORiN system. In this presentation, we introduce a current SCOT project and the design concept of new open platform architecture for the integration of master/slave robotic devices and information guided robot especially for oral and maxillofacial surgery. This design will accelerate the development of any types of robotic interfaces/end effectors with fast validation.
  • Biography
    Ken Masamune received the Ph.D. degree in precision machinery engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1999. From 1995 to 1999, he was a Research Associate in the Department of Precision Machinery Engineering, the University of Tokyo. From 2000 to 2004, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biotechnology, Tokyo Denki University, Tokyo. Since 2005, he has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanoinformatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo. His current research interests include computer-aided surgery, especially medical robotics and visualization devices and systems for surgery.

jshongdgist

Jaesung Hong, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology

  • AUGMENTED REALITY FOR SURGICAL NAVIGATION
  • Abstract
    In these days, augmented reality (AR) has become a key technology for surgical navigation. Using the AR technology, the shape of invisible organs are overlapped to the visible endoscopic or microscopic images. Therefore the surgeon can avoid damaging the healthy tissue, and reduce the incision area. In the AR-based surgery, optical tracker and camera are generally used. Optical tracker can measure the position and pose of multiple markers, and the relationship between the camera and target organs of patient can be measured in real-time by tracking of the markers which are mounted on the camera body and the patient. In the AR display, finding the relationship between the optical marker mounted on the camera body and the center of camera (camera registration) is particulary important. This relationship strongly affects the overall accuracy of AR display. In this talk, the latest AR technologies applied for the surgical navigation are introduced.
  • Biography
    Jaesung Hong is an associate professor and the Department Chair of Robotics Engineering at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), South Korea. His research area is medical imaging and medical robotics for minimally invasive surgery.
    At the University of Tokyo, he has developed the world first US-guided needle insertion robot tracking a movable and deformable organ. This was reported in Physics in Medicine and Biololgy in 2004, and has been frequently cited (> 160). While he worked at Kyushu University Hospital in Japan, he developed various customized surgical navigation systems, which were clinically applied in approximately 120 surgeries. These included percutaneous ablation therapies for liver tumors, cochlear implant surgeries, neurosurgeries for gliomas, and dental implant surgeries.
    After moving to DGIST which is a research-oriented special university supported by Korean government, he developed a single port surgery robot and its master device for high force transimisson and large workspace as well as a portable, AR-based surgical navigation system, which has been tested in tibia tumor resections and orthognathic surgeries in collaboration with major Korean hospitals, including the Seoul National University Hospital of Bundang, Samsung Seoul Hospital, etc. He is one of a small number of specialists who is familiar with both engineering and clinical medicine.
    Until 2016, Prof. Hong has published approximately 42 journal papers including 30 SCI/SCIE papers with impact factors. Six of them are top 10% ranked journal papers. He also submitted or registered 15 domestic and 7 international patents. He has received 9 best paper/presentation awards, in addition to obtaining 10 research funds amounting to approximately 4.5M USD (including planned budgets).

KwokKaWai

Ka-Wai Kwok, University of Hong Kong

  • MR-COMPATIBLE ROBOTIC SYSTEMS: TOWARDS THE INTRAOPERATIVE MRI-GUIDED INTERVENTIONS
  • Abstract
    Advanced surgical robotics has attracted significant research interest in supporting image guidance, even magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for effective navigation of surgical instruments. In situ effective guidance of access routes to the target anatomy, rendered based on imaging data, can enable a distinct awareness of the position of robotic instrument tip relative to the target anatomy in various types of minimally invasive interventions. Therefore, such MRI-guided robots will rely on real-time processing the co-registration of surgical plan with the imaging data captured during the intervention, as well as computing the relative configuration between the instrument and the anatomy of surgical interest.
    This talk will present a compact robotic system capable to operate inside the bore of MRI scanner, as well as its solutions to technical challenges of providing a safe, effective catheter-based surgical manipulation. The proposed image processing system demonstrates its clinical potential of enhanced surgical safety by imposing visual feedback on tele-operated robotic instruments even under large-scale and rapid tissue deformations in soft tissue surgeries, such as cardiac electrophysiology and stereotactic neurosurgery. The ultimate research objective is to enable the operator to perform safe, precise and effective control of robotics instruments with the aid of pre- and intra-operative MRI models. The present work will be timely to bridge the current technical gap between MRI and surgical robotic control.
  • Biography
    Dr. Ka-Wai Kwok is currently assistant professor in Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, who completed his PhD training in The Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London in 2011, where he continued research on surgical robotics as a postdoctoral fellow. After then, Dr. Kwok obtained the Croucher Foundation Fellowship 2013-14, which supported his research jointly hosted by The University of Georgia, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital – Harvard Medical School. His research interests focus on surgical robotics, intra-operative medical image processing, and their uses of high-performance computing techniques. To date, he has been involved in various designs of surgical robotic devices and interfaces for endoscopy, laparoscopy, stereotactic and intra-cardiac catheter interventions. His work has also been recognized by several awards from IEEE international conferences, including ICRA’14, IROS’13 and FCCM’11. He also became the recipient of Early Career Awards 2015/16 offered by Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong.

RenHongliang-BME-NUS

Hongliang Ren, National University of Singapore, Singapore

  • TOWARDS MAGNETIC ACTUATED MICROROBOTIC NEEDLESS INJECTION
  • Abstract
    The feasibility of a needleless magnetic-actuated device for the purpose of intravitreal injections is investigated using three different design prototypes.
    A needleless device could potentially significantly reduce patient anxiety levels and occurrences of needle stick injuries to both healthcare workers and patients Moreover, a magnetic-actuated device allows for control of the current supplied over time to the device and the corresponding depth of penetration of the drug.
    Substitutes for the sclera and vitreous region were used in the experiments where a blue dye was injected using the two separate devices to identify if these devices were able to eject the liquid with enough force needed to penetrate the sclera and deliver the liquid to within the vitreous region and whether there was a relationship between the current supplied to the devices and the depth of delivery The solenoid prototype injector was not able to eject the liquid at a force required to penetrate the sclera although, because the vitreous region was a lot softer, a follow through current was predicted to be able to deliver the bulk of the liquid to the middle portion of the vitreous substitute used in this experiment. Moreover, the addition of a controller to the system was able to produce a two part force to the liquid, the initial peak force meant to penetrate the sclera and a follow through force to deliver the drug to the vitreous region only.
  • Biography
    Dr. Hongliang Ren is currently an assistant professor and leading a research group on medical mechatronics in the Biomedical Engineering Department of National University of Singapore (NUS). He is an affiliated Principal Investigator for the Singapore Institute of Neurotechnology (SINAPSE) and Advanced Robotics Center at National University of Singapore. Dr. Ren received his PhD in Electronic Engineering (Specialized in Biomedical Engineering) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2008. After his graduation, he worked as a Research Fellow in the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) and the Engineering Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (ERC-CISST), Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Computer Science, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA, from 2008 to 2010. In 2010, he joined the Pediatric Cardiac Biorobotics Lab, Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Children’s Hospital Boston & Harvard Medical School, USA, for investigating the beating heart robotic surgery system. Prior to joining NUS, he also worked in 2012 on a collaborative computer integrated surgery project, at the Surgical Innovation Institute of Children’s National Medical Center, USA. His main areas of interest include Biomedical Mechatronics, Computer-Integrated Surgery, and Dynamic Positioning in Medicine.

BIOROB2016 Workshop in Surgical Robotics

Themes

  • Image-Guided Therapy
  • Interventional Devices
  • Human-in-the-loop System
  • Computer-Assisted Surgery
  • Multi-modal sensor fusion
  • Human-Robot Interactions
  • Soft Robotics in Surgery
  • Artificial Intelligence in Robotic Surgery

Date: June 26 (Sunday), 9:30 AM ~ 5:30 PM (BIOROB2016 Program[.pdf])

  • Morning session: 09:30-12:30 (with 30 minutes for each talk and one coffee break)
  • Afternoon Session: 14:30-17:30

no images were found

Venue: NUS CeLS, 28 Medical Dr, Singapore 117456

Speakers and Agenda (Tentative)

  • — 0800-0930 Registration & Coffee
  • 9:30AM, Zheng Li, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
  • 10AM, Chwee Ming Lim, National University Hospital, National University of Singapore, Singapore
  • — 10:30AM-10:45AM, Coffee break
  • 10:45AM, Hongbin Liu, King’s College London, UK
  • 11:15AM, Sebastian Matich, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
  • 12PM, Sarthak Misra, University of Twente, Netherlands
  • — 12:30, Lunch break & SINAPSE Tour
  • 2:30PM, Leonardo De Mattos, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy
  • 3PM, Wooram Park, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
  • — 3:30PM-3:45PM, Coffee break
  • 3:45PM, Etsuko Kobayashi, University of Tokyo, Japan
  • 4:15PM, Kevin Cleary, Children’s National Medical Center, USA
  • 4:45PM, Hongliang Ren, National University of Singapore, Singapore
  • — 6PM, Social Event

Topics

lizheng

Zheng Li, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

  • Surgical Robot: from Rigid to Flexible – a mechanical point of view
  • Abstract
    Surgical robots, represented by the da Vinci Surgical System, has been increasingly used in the operating theatres. Benefits of the robot include: increased precision, finer movement, improved dexterity, reduced tremor, better vision, capable of remote-operation, etc. These benefits are attributed to multiple factors, mechanical design, advanced control, imaging, communication, etc. Mechanical design or the structure is fundamental. It defines the reachable workspace as well as dexterity of the end effector. From the structure point of view, current surgical arms could be divided into rigid arms and flexible arms. Rigid arms, like the Endowrist instruments of da Vinci surgical system, contains a rigid slim shaft and a wrist. During the operation the shaft pivots about the trocar to reposition the end effector. The consequence is small internal workspace, large external operation space and possible tear of the incision. Flexible arms, on the other hand, could bend inside the cavity. This increases the workspace and alleviates the need for pivoting. For semi-flexible surgical arms the shaft is still rigid. At the distal end of the shaft is a flexible bending section. They are mostly used in MIS, LESS and SPA surgeries. When the shaft becomes flexible as well, the surgical arm could navigate through natural orifice and performing NOTES. Due to the benefits of flexible surgical arms, much effort has been devoted to developing flexible surgical robots globally. A few flexible surgical robots have received FDA approval. It is believed that in the near future, a lot more would go into the operating theatre. In this presentation, the current status of flexible surgical robots research will be introduced. Also, some of my research on flexible mechanisms will be shared.
  • Biography
    Zheng Li received his B.S and M.S degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Beihang University, China, and his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical and Automation Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, in 2007, 2010, and 2013 respectively. Now he is a research assistant professor in the institute of Digestive Disease and Chow Yuk Ho Technology Centre for Innovative Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His current research mainly focuses on the topic of medical robots, including flexible surgical robot, active capsule-like robots and bio-inspired robots. He is a member of IEEE and ASME. In the past years, he served as committee member of a number of conferences, such as Robio, ICIA and CCECE, and reviewer of several journals, such as IEEE/ASME T-MECH, Robotics and Biomimetics, Journal of Intelligent and Robotic systems. He is the author of one book, three book chapters, over 30 journal/conference papers, and a number of patents/copyrights. He won the best paper finalist of Robio 2012, CCECE 2015, Conference paper award of CCECE 2015, First prize of 13th Challenge Cup, Champion of 2013 CUHK Professor Charlse K. Kao Student Creativity Awards, etc.

Dr LimChweeMing

Chwee Ming Lim, National University Hospital, Singapore

  • Current status of robotic head and neck surgery in Singapore
  • Abstract
    Robotic assisted head and neck surgery is a new surgical aramentarium in the management of both benign and malignant head and neck disease. Trans-oral robotic surgery (TORS) has been utilized in the resection of early T1/T2 oropharyngeal cancer, as well as removing deep-seated tumors such as parapharyngeal space tumors and supraglottic/hypopharyngeal tumors. Additionally, accessing thyroid nodules or benign tumors in the neck can be made from a remote access incision such as the trans-axillary or retro-auricular (or modified facelift). These new techniques open a new paradigm in the surgical management of head and neck diseases and the current adoption of the technology in an academic tertiary medical centre will be presented.
  • Biography
    Dr Lim graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, National University of Singapore in 1998. He underwent residency in Otolaryngology in Singapore and was awarded the Gold medal for the MRCS (Edinburgh) General Surgery examination in 2003, and subsequently the Gold medal award by the College of Surgeons for the best performing resident in the exit examination organised by the Specialist Training Committee in Otolaryngology in 2009. After completing his specialist training, Dr Lim joined the Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery in NUH as an Associate Consultant. He started his practice and pursued further training in head and neck oncologic surgery at the National University Health System, Singapore. In 2010, he was awarded the Ministry of Health Overseas Training award and pursued a 2-year Head and Neck Oncologic Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in the United States of America. This fellowship is accredited by the Advanced Training Council of the American Head and Neck Society. During these 2 years, Dr Lim did translational benchwork research in immunotherapy in head and neck cancer, focusing on immunological mechanisms in monoclonal antibody based therapy in cancer and identifying novel immune modifiers in cancer therapy. In his clinical training, Dr Lim was trained in transoral robotic surgery (TORS), minimally invasive video assisted thyroidectomy (MIVAT) and minimally invasive approaches in head and neck surgery, in addition to the major head and neck resections. Upon his return to Singapore in 2012, he was appointed Consultant at the Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, NUH, and Assistant Professor at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS.

hbliu

Hongbin Liu, King’s College London, UK

  • A catheter robot for semi-autonomous cardiac ablation
  • Abstract
    Catheter ablation is a widely used minimally invasive procedure to treat arrhythmias when medications are unable to restore the normal heart rhythm. However, this is a highly skilled procedure, requiring extensive training, and may take many hours for a single procedure even in the most experienced hands. Robotics technology provides promising solutions to increase the accessibility of this treatment modality, and to assist training. However, existing robotic solutions remain unable to reduce the procedure time notably and the associated high cost precludes their widespread use. To address the above issues, in a new catheter steering robot for ablation procedures are being developed at King’s College London. This talk introduces the design of the catheter robot, the semi-autonomous catheter navigation control, and the contact force estimation based on shape tracking. The initial results show that robot can improve the current catheter ablation procedure in terms of both reducing the procedure time and increasing the ablation accuracy, with cost-effective design features.
  • Biography
    Hongbin Liu is currently a lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Centre for Robotics Research, Department of Informatics, King’s College London, UK, where he is leading the Robotic Contact Perception Lab. He received his B.S. degree in 2005 from the Northwestern Polytechnique University, Xi’an, China, and received MSc in 2006 and PhD degree in robotics in 2010 both from Kings College London, UK. He is a member of IEEE and Technical Committee Member for IEEE EMBS BioRobotics. His research is focusing on enriching the robot’s perception of during medical interventions, and making use of the augmented perception to enable quicker, safer, procedure. Applications of his research include soft tissue palpation during minimally invasive surgery, interventional cardiology and endoscopy.

SebastianMatich

Sebastian Matich, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

  • A Single Port Robotic System with parallel kinematic arms for rectal surgery
  • Abstract
    Single-Port surgery is an innovative technique and the next step in minimally invasive surgery. Performing complex surgical procedures through only one single incision or a natural orifice is a challenging task that could be simplified by involving surgical telemanipulators. Throughout the last decade, several single-port robots where introduced. While most of these system use cable driven continuum robots to set up the intracorporeal arms the FLEXMIN device uses miniaturized parallel kinematics instead.
    This talk introduces the surgical telemanipulator FLEXMIN and focuses on the design and characterisation of the parallel kinematics. Because the telemanipulator will provide haptic feedback, the results of a first realized sensor concept that uses distally located force sensors to measure the tip force is presented.
    With the manufactured prototype, complex surgical procedures like suturing and knot tying can be performed. Furthermore, it is shown that this approach is capable of applying high payloads exceeding 5 N and generating dynamic movements with speeds of more than 320 mm/s and accelerations beyond 1 G.
    Because of the rigidity, excellent controllability and low latency the manipulator can perform high dynamic movements with the potential to compensate the movements of organs.
  • Biography
    Sebastian Matich received his diploma in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from Technische Universität Darmstadt, in 2011. He is currently working as research associate at the Institute of Electromechanical Design. His main research topic is the development of small scale parallel kinematic structures for use in surgical robotics. Additional research topics are precision engineering, small drives and sensor design.

Sarthak

Sarthak Misra, University of Twente, Netherlands

  • Steering Flexible Instruments using Fiber Bragg Grating Sensors
  • Abstract
    Flexible minimally invasive surgical instruments can be used to target difficult-to-reach locations within the human body. Accurately steering these instruments requires information about the three-dimensional shape of the instrument. In this talk, we use an array of Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors to reconstruct the shape of flexible instruments, and to robotically control the instrument. FBG sensors have several advantages over existing imaging modalities, which make them well-suited for use in a clinical environment. First, an array of FBG sensors is integrated on a Nitinol wire (1 mm diameter). A bevel tip is made on the tip of the shape sensing wire, such that a flexible needle is realized which bends during insertion into tissue. This needle with FBG sensors is inserted into biological tissue, and the resulting deflected shape is reconstructed and compared with camera images. Next, the needle is used as a stylet in a novel needle design with a tendon-driven actuated-tip. Kinematic models of the needle are combined with the needle pose reconstructed from FBG sensors to steer the needle in soft-tissue simulants. FBG-based shape sensing has also been used for the control of tendon-driven continuum manipulators. We control the position of the tip of a single-segment manipulator. This is followed by a case where we use FBG sensors to control the shape of a planar manipulator with two segments. In this case, the reconstructed shape was used for both obstacle avoidance while steering the manipulator tip along a pre-defined path. Finally, we demonstrate that continuum manipulators along with FBG sensors can be used for intrinsic force sensing.
  • Biography
    Sarthak Misra joined the University of Twente in 2009. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomechanical Engineering within the Faculty of Engineering Technology. He directs theSurgical Robotics Laboratory, and is affiliated with MIRA – Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine. He is also affiliated with theDepartment of Biomedical Engineering, University of Groningen and University Medical Center Groningen. Sarthak obtained his doctoral degree in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 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, Montreal, Canada. He is the recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) Starting grant, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) VENI award, Link Foundation fellowship, McGill Major fellowship, and NASA Space Flight Awareness award. He is the co-chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee on Surgical Robotics, and area co-chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Biological and Medical Systems. 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.

Leonardo

Leonardo De Mattos, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy

  • Robot-Assisted Laser Microsurgery: Overcoming Translational Barriers
  • Abstract
    This talk will present an overview of technology research, development and innovation activities in robot-assisted laser microsurgery at IIT. Lasers are being increasingly used in operating rooms as precision surgical tools for delicate surgeries on both soft and hard tissue. Applications range from fetal surgery to orthopedics, with significant examples in ophthalmology and laryngology. However, current clinical technologies do not properly support the accurate and intuitive use of lasers for high-precision high-quality microsurgeries, imposing severe challenges to the operations. To improve on this, new surgical robotic technologies and capabilities are being developed at IIT. Robot assistance is particularly suited and desired for laser microsurgery applications. Recent results prove they can augment the sensing and actuation capabilities of microsurgeons, allowing significant improvements in terms of surgical site accessibility and visualization, laser controllability, safety and surgical quality. Nevertheless, translating robotics research results to clinical practice is a long and challenging process in itself, involving a continuous refinement process with many system redesigns and simplifications. This talk will conclude presenting the IIT experience in this last phase, which is bringing microsurgical robotic systems closer to clinical trials.
  • Biography
    Leonardo S. Mattos is a Team Leader at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa. His research background includes robotic surgery, robot-assisted laser microsurgery, user interfaces, mixed and augmented reality, systems integration, automation, usability analysis, computer vision, micromanipulation, and mobile robots. Leonardo received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the North Carolina State University (NCSU, USA), where he worked as research assistant at the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (CRIM) from 2002 until 2007. Leonardo has been a researcher at the IIT’s Department of Advanced Robotics since 2007. He is currently Head of the Biomedical Robotics Laboratory, leading a group of 12 researchers. Leonardo was the PI and coordinator of the EC funded project μRALP, a very successful project dedicated to the development of new tools and systems for robot-assisted laser microsurgery, which was rated with the highest grade of Excellent at its final review.

wpark_large[1]

Wooram Park, University of Texas at Dallas, USA

  • Robotic methods for insertion of flexible needles
  • Abstract
    A flexible needle has been recently introduced and improved for drug delivery and diagnosis. The flexible needle is made with a bevel tip so that it forms a bending curve as it is inserted into soft tissue. This enables to steer the needle by rotating and inserting. For the automatic control, the kinematic model and path planning for the needle insertion are developed. To capture and utilize the uncertainty in the needle insertion, a stochastic modeling technique is applied to a nonholonomic model for the flexible needle. The nonholonomic stochastic model is then used for the probability-based path planning. In this talk, a novel design idea and a new planning method for improved needle manipulation are also discussed.
  • Biography
    Wooram Park is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of Texas at Dallas. His research mainly concerns medical robots, computational structural biology and human kinetics. Prior to joining UT Dallas in 2011, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He received his PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2008. He also received the B.S.E. and M.S.E. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1999 and 2003, respectively. He received the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best Paper Award in 2015. He was also a recipient of Creel Family Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in 2007. He is a member of IEEE and ASME.

kobayashi

Etsuko Kobayashi, University of Tokyo, Japan

  • Medical robot and navigation system using intraoperative information system for minimally invasive surgery
  • Abstract
    Endoscopic surgery is now very popular as a form of minimally invasive surgery in which surgeons perform the operation using forceps and an endoscope through trocar. However, while this surgery has lots of merits, there are disadvantages that the working flexibility and field of view are limited. To overcome this, we have developed information based robotic system. Intra-operative sensing information offers the right target position during surgery and also surgeon can confirm the reliability of the treatment. Then the robot can be controlled based on the accurate prediction of the biological response against the operation.
    In this talk, we will present the our recently developed robotic system and navigation system using intraoperative sensing information including vascular information based on ultrasound image and image mapping system for fetus surgery and force measurement system.
  • Biography
    Prof. Etsuko Kobayashi is currently an associate professor of department of precision engineering, school of engineering, the University of Tokyo. She received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degree in precision machinery engineering from the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan in 1995, 1997 and 2000, respectively. Her research interests include medical robotics, surgical navigation system and biomedical instrumentation. She has won 3rd prize of German Innovation Award and Young Investigator Award of Japan Society of Computer Aided Surgery in 2009. Now she is in charge of several research grants from Japan in Medical robotics and Computer Aided Surgery

Cleary_K

Kevin Cleary, Children’s National Medical Center, USA

  • MRI Compatible Robotics for Pediatrics
  • Abstract
    MRI compatible robotics as an area of increasing interest within the medical robotics community. In this talk I will review some of the work done to date and then present our work with MRI compatible robotics for pediatrics. Two clinical applications will be presented: shoulder arthrography and long bone biopsy.
  • Biography
    Kevin Cleary PhD is the Technical Director of the Bioengineering Initiative in the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation at Children’s National Health System in Washington DC. He is internationally known for his work in medical robotics and image-guided interventions. He currently leads a team of researchers developing biomedical devices for minimally invasive pediatric procedures.

RenHongliang-BME-NUS

Hongliang Ren, National University of Singaore, Singapore

  • Recent Progresses in Flexible Surgical Robotics and Navigation
  • Abstract
    Minimally invasive Robotic Surgery (MIRS) is emerging as a new paradigm for a wide range of surgical and interventional procedures. Common benefits of MIRS include shorter hospital stay, reduced trauma, better cosmesis, etc. Robotic devices used in MIRS are transforming from traditional rigid manipulators to flexible manipulators, which enable surgeons a wider range of operations with less trauma. Intelligence, flexibility and compliance are important features for flexible robotic systems in minimally invasive surgeries. We will discuss recent progresses while investigating tele-operated intelligent flexible surgical robotic systems. Various operation modes and intelligent navigation approaches will be discussed to cater for different clinical needs including semi-automatic teleoperation mode and full automatic image guidance. This talk will give a brief introduction to these ongoing research topics of intelligent and compliant robotics in surgical applications.
  • Biography
    Dr. Hongliang Ren is currently an assistant professor and leading a research group on medical mechatronics in the Biomedical Engineering Department of National University of Singapore (NUS). He is an affiliated Principal Investigator for the Singapore Institute of Neurotechnology (SINAPSE) and Advanced Robotics Center at National University of Singapore. Dr. Ren received his PhD in Electronic Engineering (Specialized in Biomedical Engineering) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2008. After his graduation, he worked as a Research Fellow in the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) and the Engineering Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (ERC-CISST), Department of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Computer Science, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA, from 2008 to 2010. In 2010, he joined the Pediatric Cardiac Biorobotics Lab, Department of Cardiovascular Surgery, Children’s Hospital Boston & Harvard Medical School, USA, for investigating the beating heart robotic surgery system. Prior to joining NUS, he also worked in 2012 on a collaborative computer integrated surgery project, at the Surgical Innovation Institute of Children’s National Medical Center, USA. His main areas of interest include Biomedical Mechatronics, Computer-Integrated Surgery, and Dynamic Positioning in Medicine.

More information about BIOROB 2016 at Singapore