A Medical Robotic Platform for Surgical and Interventional Procedures

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Surgical and interventional robotics has received an increasing attention in the recent years due to the effectiveness of robot-assisted procedures, leading to reduced complications, faster recovery and shorter hospitalization. From the physicians' perspective, robots augment the medical staff by imparting superhuman capabilities, such as high motion speed and accuracy, enabling high-precision operations in confined spaces. The recent analysis (by Reuters) also reveals an expected market growth of 20.8% for medical robotics industry during 2017-2023. Therefore, research progress in surgical and interventional robotics is of imminent importance to both healthcare and growing biomedical industry of Canada. Despite its recent progress, surgical and interventional robotics presents significant research opportunities, including design of instruments and control methods to overcome challenges due to the requirements for miniaturization, safety, and adaptation to changing conditions. *** The requested equipment, a seven degrees-of-freedom medical robotic manipulator, is the only economic desktop robot with international certification for medical research and development activities and working in a close proximity to the humans. Because its certification procedure is internationally recognized, the complexity of the development and licensing process for the related products is substantially reduced. This advantage will facilitate pre-clinical testing and further collaborations with the industry. The flexible control architecture of the requested model will also ease rapid integration of various sensing and control methods, and accommodation of different applications, leading to the increased usage of the equipment. *** The requested robot would enable research programs of the applicants aimed at developing new and important surgical and interventional robotic technologies for emerging medical robotics industry of Canada and Canadian healthcare. The research programs of the applicants that will immediately benefit from the requested equipment include projects related to: (1) image-guided continuum robots for medical interventions, with the focus on cardiac catheterization; (2) robotic high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU); and (3) telerobotic platforms for robotic surgery, focusing on neurosurgery, ocular surgery, and lung biopsy. *** Besides the applicants and collaborators, their graduate and undergraduate students will be trained to operate state-of-the-art medical robotic systems, and learn advanced robotic measurement, control, and navigation methods, and in-vivo experimentation techniques for medical applications. These skills will be important to their studies and in high-demand by Canadian healthcare and biomedical industry. In addition to Ryerson university, this new equipment will expand medical robotics research capacity of iBest (Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Science, and Technology) and partner hospitals. *****