LCSR Seminar: Farshid Alambeigi

Description

Farshid Alambeigi (M.Sc. '17, PhD '19), an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, will give a talk titled "Surgineering Using Intelligent and Flexible Robotic Systems" for the Laboratory for Computational Sensing + Robotics.

Abstract:

Recent technological advances in the field of surgical Robotics have resulted in the development of a range of new techniques and technologies that have reduced patient trauma, shortened hospitalization, and improved diagnostic accuracy and therapeutic outcome. Despite the many appreciated benefits of robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS), there are still significant drawbacks associated with these technologies including, dexterity, intelligence, and autonomy of the developed robotic devices and prognosis design of medical devices and implants. The dexterity limitation is associated with the poor accessibility to the areas of interest and insufficient instrument control and ergonomics caused by rigidity of the conventional instruments and implants. In other words, the ability to adequately access different target anatomy is still the main challenge of MIS end endoscopic procedures demanding specialized instrumentation, sensing and control paradigms.

To enhance the safety of robot-assisted procedures, current robotics research is also exploring new ways of providing synergistic intelligent semi/autonomous control between the surgeon and the robot. In this context, the robot can perform certain surgical tasks autonomously under the supervision of the surgeon. However, such autonomy not only requires understanding the robot's perception and adaptation to dynamically changing environments of the tissue, but also it requires understanding the mental workload and decision-making state of the surgeon as the decision-maker and key component of this systems. This demands a Surgeon-Centric Brain-In-the-Loop Autonomous Control techniques.

To address these challenges, this talk covers our efforts towards engineering of surgery (surgineering) and bringing dexterity and autonomy in various robot-assisted minimally invasive surgical procedures. Particularly, I will discuss our efforts towards enhancing the existing paradigm in spinal fixation, colorectal cancer diagnosis, and bioprinting of volumetric muscle loss injuries using continuum manipulators, soft sensors, flexible implants, and semi/autonomous intelligent surgical robotic systems.