Workshop at ICAR 2021

Workshop at ICAR 2021

December 7, 2021 – remotely held – originally Ljubljana, SLO

Workshop on Low cost medical and surgical robotics

at the 20th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR 2021)

Organizer’s message

Medical and surgical robotics are one of the fastest growing sector of service robotics, yielding important medical advances and great economic returns to the investors. However, despite the impressive growth rate, the actual numbers of robot-assisted procedures and their impact are still very small in the medical field: robotic surgical interventions account for only the 0.05% of the total number of major surgeries done every year worldwide, and no clear medical benefit has emerged in most robot-assisted procedures with respect to Minimally Invasive Surgical (MIS) procedures.

We believe the reasons for this are primarily two: the huge cost of the devices that prevent their widespread usage and the lack of diversified devices that can be used in lower cost procedures. In short, both reasons can be related to the high cost of medical robotics since it prevents smaller hospitals to use robots in their clinical practice and limits their applications to high cost procedures that guarantees the proper cost recovery.

In this workshop we want to explore the difficulties and the benefits of developing low cost medical robotic devices that can guarantee top performance at a fraction of the cost of current devices. The difficulties to achieve this goal are many, from the high cost of certification and experimentation to the marginal performance of low cost components. Thus, new algorithms need to be developed to achieve high performance from components derived from mass production products, and new certification procedures could be proposed to the notifiedbodies. Of course, if this approach will be successful, we could finally see robots integrated in all medical procedures.

 

Paolo Fiorini and Pietro Valdastri

Registrations

To register to the workshop sessions (morning and/or afternoon), please fill in the contact form at the link below, and you will later receive the access link.

Programme

Workshop on Low cost medical and surgical robotics

CET Time

• 10am – 10.10am Welcome and Introduction

• 10.10am – 10.30am David Jayne, Leeds Teaching Hospital (Professor Colorectal Surgery)

• 10.30am – 10.50am Peter Culmer, University of Leeds (Associate Professor Mechanical Engineering)

• 10.50am – 11.10am Manish Chauhan, University of York (Lecturer in Medical Engineering)

• 11.10am – 11.30am Tim Horeman, Technical University of Delft (Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering)

• 11.30am – 11.35am Short break

• 11.35am – 12.00pm Round Table

• 12.00pm – 12.30pm Draft of a white paper & Conclusion

The ICAR-2021 logo is designed by Jadran Lenarčič, is inspired by the history of the city of Ljubljana. discover more

Workshop “Embodied AI in robotic surgery: Outcomes of the EU funded SARAS project”

Organized by Riccardo Muradore, Marcello Bonfe, Cristian Secchi, Francesco Setti, Elettra Oleari.

Agenda and (free) registration link here