ABSTRACT

Virtual surgery involves the development of technology for high fidelity medical simulation to enhance clinical competency and patient safety. As such, for the first time in the history of modern surgery, virtual surgery represents a fundamental shift from the existing paradigm of learning, training, planning and discovery outside the operating room. “Enhancing virtual reality” has been identified as one of the Engineering Grand Challenges by the National Academy of Engineering. The intellectual merit of my research is to address and solve some of the most fundamental challenges in virtual surgery and develop high fidelity virtual environments for enhanced patient safety by providing a platform for selection, training, credentialing and retraining of physicians, pre-operative planning of complex surgical procedures, and innovating surgical procedures, devices and platforms for emerging surgical modalities including Single Incision Laparoscopic Surgery (SILS) and Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES). This is possibly the most exciting time in the field of virtual surgery which is gaining momentum from the confluence of two major forces – quantum advances in cyberinfrastructure and growing acceptance by the medical community. The potentials appear limitless. However, a cautious approach is necessary to maintain realism of expectations from both the Engineering and Medical communities. While some hurdles have been crossed, many more remain before this Grand Challenge is effectively addressed. This talk will address some of these issues.

BIOGRAPHY

Suvranu De is J Erik Jonsson ’22 Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He serves as Head of the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering and Director of the Center for Modeling, Simulation and Imaging in Medicine. He received his Sc.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2001. He is the recipient of the 2005 ONR Young Investigator Award. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Computational Surgery, International Journal of Modern Mechanics, International Journal of Computational Methods, and Computers & Structures as well as scientific committees of numerous national and international conferences. He also serves as Vice Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics, Chair of the Computational Bioengineering Committee of the US Association for Computational Mechanics and member of several committees of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons. His research interests include the development of novel, robust and reliable computational technology to solve challenging and high-impact problems in engineering, medicine and biology.