Medico-surgical-rehab robots: fostering community interaction for safety, standards and regulatory issues

This workshop scope is to bring together experts in medico-surgical-rehabilitation robotics in order to discuss the ongoing issues regarding safety, to provide to the participants insight in the ongoing standardization activities, and to collect their live experience input for safety and standards, and regulatory issues, to criss cross the different point of view to produce valuable inputs of the European experts and projects for the standardization ISO working Groups. The discussion shall include the many aspects related to safety in this robotics area, the regulatory and legal aspects, the possible new approaches to risk assessment, software quality, physical and non physical interfaces, human factors, use cases. The field of medical robots including surgical and rehabilitation robotics is expanding with new market viable products implementing latest scientific results. The basic safety and essential performance requirements in this domain are referred to multiple areas: • on one side we need standards to build safe medical robot systems. This is vital because in the medical, surgical and rehabilitation field the robot is typically in direct contact with the exterior and interior of the human body and applies forces to the patient in different ways. This also implies the need for safe control systems, training issues and many other factors that can influence the overall “safety”. • on the other side the safety issues have to be weighed by the medical approach considering if the robotics technology is providing at least the same benefit for the patient as the traditional alternatives. • Multiple regulatory issues are involved that are strictly connected to the safety approach and to the technical implementation choices that are to be subsumed in the standard

Computer- and robot-assisted Medical Intervention

Medical robotics includes assistive devices used by the physician in order to make his/her diagnostic or therapeutic practices easier and more efficient. This chapter focuses on such systems. It introduces the general field of Computer-Assisted Medical Interventions, its aims, its different components and describes the place of robots in that context. The evolutions in terms of general design and control paradigms in the development of medical robots are presented and issues specific to that application domain are discussed. A view of existing systems, on-going developments and future trends is given. A case-study is detailed. Other types of robotic help in the medical environment (such as for assisting a handicapped person, for rehabilitation of a patient or for replacement of some damaged/suppressed limbs or organs) are out of the scope of this chapter.Comment: Handbook of Automation, Shimon Nof (Ed.) (2009) 000-00

Medical robotics: where we come from, where we are and where we could go

This short note presents a viewpoint about medical robotics

Identification of Hazards in Invasive/Surgical Robotics

Service robotics receives more and more attention in the developed world beside industrial applications. While industrial robotics conquered the factories, it was important that researches develop a number of principles and guidelines to help minimizing the risk of human accidents. Today’s safety standards of industrial robotics almost completely exclude the possibility of physical interaction between the human operator and the robotic device. Just recently, a new paradigm, the divided workspace has prevailed, and as a consequence, a number of new and critical safety issues have emerged. Service robots have become even more complicated, as we cannot erect a fence around domestic robots, and in the case of medical robotics, the human–machine interaction is inevitable. The goal of this research was to explore and quantify human–machine interactions, and classify them based on their hazard level. The focus is on surgical robotic devices and their current applications, as this situation presents one of the most complex form of interaction. It is necessary to make service robots complying with safety standards, based on a unified and generally accepted methodology

Robot Autonomy for Surgery

Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing precision of care due to sub-millimeter robot control, real-time utilization of biosignals for interventional care, improvements to surgical efficiency and execution, and computer-aided guidance under various medical imaging and sensing modalities. While these methods may displace some tasks of surgical teams and individual surgeons, they also present new capabilities in interventions that are too difficult or go beyond the skills of a human. In this chapter, we provide an overview of robot autonomy in commercial use and in research, and present some of the challenges faced in developing autonomous surgical robots

Healthcare Robotics

Robots have the potential to be a game changer in healthcare: improving health and well-being, filling care gaps, supporting care givers, and aiding health care workers. However, before robots are able to be widely deployed, it is crucial that both the research and industrial communities work together to establish a strong evidence-base for healthcare robotics, and surmount likely adoption barriers. This article presents a broad contextualization of robots in healthcare by identifying key stakeholders, care settings, and tasks; reviewing recent advances in healthcare robotics; and outlining major challenges and opportunities to their adoption.Comment: 8 pages, Communications of the ACM, 201

Medical image computing and computer-aided medical interventions applied to soft tissues. Work in progress in urology

Until recently, Computer-Aided Medical Interventions (CAMI) and Medical Robotics have focused on rigid and non deformable anatomical structures. Nowadays, special attention is paid to soft tissues, raising complex issues due to their mobility and deformation. Mini-invasive digestive surgery was probably one of the first fields where soft tissues were handled through the development of simulators, tracking of anatomical structures and specific assistance robots. However, other clinical domains, for instance urology, are concerned. Indeed, laparoscopic surgery, new tumour destruction techniques (e.g. HIFU, radiofrequency, or cryoablation), increasingly early detection of cancer, and use of interventional and diagnostic imaging modalities, recently opened new challenges to the urologist and scientists involved in CAMI. This resulted in the last five years in a very significant increase of research and developments of computer-aided urology systems. In this paper, we propose a description of the main problems related to computer-aided diagnostic and therapy of soft tissues and give a survey of the different types of assistance offered to the urologist: robotization, image fusion, surgical navigation. Both research projects and operational industrial systems are discussed