I joined CMI in September 1997, in the Robotic Microsurgery division. The surgical platform is a set
of three teleoperated robots: one holding an endoscope and the other two holding surgical implements. In a sense
the robots are surgical assistants to the surgeon which enable the surgeon to perform endoscopic procedures while
retaining good ergonomics. Some of the projects I have done/am doing at CMI are:
- Robotic platform OS and control software: I designed a real-time kernel for
the custom computational hardware which is used by CMI and the overall software architecture. I also modeled, analysed
and implemented control for the force reflecting robotic setup.
- Endoscopic robotic beating heart surgery with active motion cancellation (Virtual Stillness)
(completed): Beating heart surgery allows cardiac surgery to
be performed without requiring thepatient to be put on cardiopulmonary bypass (a heart-lung machine.0 Patient outcomes
are improved and the surgery can be performed less invasively. The problem is the motion of the beating heart and
the difficulty of suturing on tiny (<3mm diameter) vessles under magnification. Virtual Stillness is a motion
cancellation scheme in which endoscope and surgical instrument holding robots are moved in unison with the heart
to present the surgeon with a "virtually still" heart (in engineering terms the surgeon is in a moving
frame of reference which is stationary with respect to the heart.) There are lots of interesting issues to doing
this: from the detection of heart motion in real time to dealing with planning motions in accelerated frames of
reference.
- Investigation of the effect of various motion mappings on surgeon dexterity (completed): The effectiveness of using robotic assistance is greatly influenced
by the ease with which the surgeon can control the motion of the robots and the "feel" fo the system.
We investigated a set of different motion mapping strategies in this project.
- Collaboratory projects: I manage a couple of collaboratory projects for CMI.
These deal with force reflection over networks (ongoing) and surgical planning using preoperative data (proposal
accepted: to start).
- Telesurgery: I managed the technical team
for this project. The goal of the project was to exhibit a human telesurgery with the patient in Paris and the
Surgeon in New York. The robotic system is used to perform the procedure.