Robotic Assistance for Improving Surgeries and Therapies

by Mahdi Tavakoli from the University of Alberta.

This presentation will discuss the potentials of robotics technologies for improving healthcare by making surgeries and therapies more accessible and efficient – we will consider telesurgery and beating-heart surgery as two examples. Robots can facilitate minimally invasive surgery (MIS), which is surgery through small incisions made in the body. Given the widespread use of robotic systems for on-site MIS over the past few years, it is interesting to consider using robots for performing surgery over a distance (telesurgery), which has the potential to significantly improve healthcare in remote communities and provide cost-effective services. As for robot-assisted beating-heart surgery, it is known that image guidance is critical for navigating surgical instruments to desired positions in the patient’s heart when it is pumping blood. In this context, one of the still unsolved challenges is the tracking of the beating heart during surgery in order to synchronize the motions of a surgical robot to the motions of the heart. Once this problem is overcome, the beating heart will seem steady to the surgeon allowing him/her to perform complicated procedures on the heart without having to stop it.