CAREER: Next-Generation Surgical Robots for Energy-based Surgery

该学院早期职业发展（Career）奖将使一类新型手术机器人能够通过集中输送能量来治疗疾病，而无需与受影响的组织进行物理接触。该项目将研究多种形式的能量，包括激光、射频和超声波。该项目将创建基于能量的传感模式，用低能量光束探测解剖结构，以确定其形状和热性能。这些测量结果甚至可以在手术过程中实时更新，将允许更安全、更精确地切除病变组织。最初，所有的功能都将由外科医生的命令来完成，但由于机器人的反应速度比人类快得多，因此该项目的最终目标是使某些程序能够自主执行。基于能量的手术机器人有可能通过减少手术侵入性、恢复时间和治疗费用，以及通过对目前认为无法手术的危及生命的疾病进行全新的手术来改善公众健康。本科生和研究生参与该项目将有助于培养美国下一代外科机器人工程师。该研究项目将支持创建一个新的感知和控制技术框架，使手术机器人能够监测和调节其基于能量的末端执行器产生的热效应。该项目将结合计算机科学和工程多个领域的思想和方法，包括传热、有限元建模、生物医学成像、统计状态估计和非线性控制理论。预期的科学贡献包括：(1)新的感知技术，有效地整合了热感测、成像和基于物理的模拟，以推断关键的患者信息；(2)新的控制算法，利用这种增强的感知来自动调节能量输送，从而在存在不确定性的情况下实现规定的结果；(3)将人类操作员适当融入机器人能量仪器控制的策略。这项工作的预期长期影响将是扩展对机器人与其环境相互作用的理解，超越对接触力的分析和控制，结合基于能量的热交换和结构温度控制的非接触功能。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will enable a new class of surgical robots to treat disease via focused delivery of energy, without the need for physical contact with the affected tissue. The project will investigate multiple forms of energy, including lasers, radiofrequency, and ultrasonic waves. The project will create energy-based sensing modes that probe anatomical structures with a low-energy beam to determine their shape and thermal properties. These measurements, which can be updated in real-time even during a procedure, will allow safer and more precise removal of diseased tissue. Initially, all functions will be performed by command of a surgeon but because a robot is capable of reacting much faster than a human, the eventual goal of the project is to enable autonomous implementation of certain procedures. Energy-based surgical robots have the potential to improve public health by reducing surgical invasiveness, recovery times, and treatment costs, and by enabling entirely new procedures for life-threatening conditions that are currently considered inoperable. Participation of undergraduate and graduate students in this project will contribute to the training of the nation’s next generation of surgical robotics engineers. This research project will support the creation of a new framework of perception and control techniques to enable surgical robots that monitor and regulate the thermal effects created by their energy-based end effectors. The project will combine ideas and approaches from multiple areas of computer science and engineering, including heat transfer, finite element modeling, biomedical imaging, statistical state estimation, and nonlinear control theory. Expected scientific contributions include (1) new perception techniques that efficiently integrate thermal sensing, imaging, and physics-based simulations to infer critical patient information; (2) new control algorithms that leverage this enhanced perception to automatically regulate energy delivery and so achieve prescribed outcomes in the presence of uncertainty; and (3), strategies to appropriately integrate human operators into the control of robotic energy-based instruments. The expected long-term impact of this work will be to extend understanding of the interactions of robots with their environments beyond the analysis and control of contact forces, to incorporate non-contact functionality enabled by energy-based heat exchange and the control of structural temperatures.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.