MED Lab members attend International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Posted by Michelle Bukowski on Wednesday, June 28, 2017 in News.

Three members of the Vanderbilt Medical Engineering and Discovery Lab (MEDLab) attended the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) last week in Singapore.

Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Robert Webster, the lab director, was invited to give a talk on his recent research, while Ph.D. student Patrick Anderson and postdoctoral scholar Loris Fichera each presented a contributed paper.

In his talk, entitled “Single Port Robots as Hand-Held Tools … and When to do the Opposite,” Professor Webster discussed advantages and disadvantages of single-port robotic surgery. He presented a novel concept for a reconfigurable robot made of little needle-sized tentacles that are introduced into the body through multiple tiny skin incisions small enough that can be simply closed with a Band-Aid to perform complex procedures such as ablation of lung tumors

Patrick Anderson presented this system in more detail in his contributed talk, entitled “Continuum Reconfigurable Parallel Robots for Surgery: Shape Sensing and State Estimation With Uncertainty.” In addition to this talk, Patrick also presented another paper (Real-Time Redundancy Resolution for Concentric Tube Robots to Avoid Elastic Instability, authors: Patrick Anderson, Richard Hendrick and Robert Webster III) at the C4 Surgical Robotics Workshop, an event associated with the conference and part of ICRA’s official program, and won the best poster award, sponsored by Intuitive Surgical.

Loris Fichera presented a miniature robotic endoscope aimed to provide visualization inside the ear passing through the nose. This device has the potential to provide accurate diagnoses and eliminate the need for exploratory surgery for many patients suffering from middle ear disease – about 1 in 50 people get some form of ME disease at some point during their lifetime. This is a joint project between VU and VUMC; Loris’ home desk is inside the Medical Center, where he works side by side with ear surgeons.

Both Patrick’s and Loris’ papers are now published in Robotics and Automation Letters – links below.