Runner Up Paper Award in 2012 Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics

Our recent progress in the field of surgical robotics that discusses the micro-motion-analysis based skill assessment techniques was presented at the 2012 IEEE Bio-robotics and Bio-mechatronics Conference as well as at 2012 Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics (HSMR). Dr.Krovi attended both the conferences in Italy and London respectively. The audience who attended both the presentations were much appreciative of our work and we wish to thank everyone of them for their valuable questions/ feedback. 

Specifically, the paper titled "Minimally Invasive Surgical Skill Assessment by Video-Motion Analysis" that was presented at HSMR also bagged the runner-up paper-poster award at the conference. Dr.Krovi who presented the paper at the symposium in Imperial College at London, UK personally received the award from Professor the Lord Darzi of Denham and Professor Guang-Zhong Yan. We, from ARMLAB, would like to congratulate all the contributors of this work and wish all the best to achieve further success in their respective endeavors.

Related Publications:
Journal

[J01] Jun, S.-K., Sathia Narayanan, M., Garimella, S., MD, Singhal, P, MD, Corso, J. J. and Krovi, V., “Evaluation of Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgical Skills using Motion Studies”, 2013 Journal of Robotic Surgery. 

Conferences

[C06] Kumar, S., Sathia Narayanan, M., Singhal, P, MD, Corso, J. J. and Krovi, V., “Product-of-Tracking-Experts for Surgical Tool Visual Tracking”, 2013 IEEE Conference on Auomation Science and Engineering, Madison, WI (submitted for review).

[C05] Kumar, S., Sathia Narayanan, M., Singhal, P, MD, Corso, J. J. and Krovi, V., “Surgical Tool Attributes for Intraoperative Semantic Feedback”, 2013 Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Information Society, Tokyo, Japan (submitted for review).

[C04]Kumar, S., Narayanan, M.S., Misra, S., Garimella, S., MD, Singhal, P, MD, Corso, J., and Krovi, V., “ Vision based Decision-Support and Safety Systems for Robotic Surgery”, 2013 Medical Cyber-Physical Systems Workshop (MedCPS), Philadelphia, PA, Apr 8, 2013.
[C03]Jun, S.-K., Narayanan, M.S., Eddib, A., MD, Garimella, S., MD, Singhal, P, MD, and Krovi, V., “Minimally Invasive Surgical Skill Assessment by Video-Motion Analysis”, 2012 5th Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics, 2012, London, UK, Jun 30-Jul 2. [BIB | RIS]  [PDF]
[C02]Jun, S.-K., Narayanan, M.S., Eddib, A., MD, Garimella, S., MD, Singhal, P, MD, and Krovi, V., “Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgical Skill Assessment based on Automated Video-Analysis Motion Studies”, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, Roma, Italy, Jun 24-28, 2012. [BIB | RIS]  [PDF]
[C01]Jun, S.-K., Narayanan, M.S., Eddib, A., MD, Garimella, S., MD, Singhal, P, MD, and Krovi, V., “Evaluation of Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgical Skills using Motion Studies”, 2012 Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PerMIS'12) Workshop, College Park, MD, March 20-22, 2012. [BIB | RIS] [PDF]

Poster
[P01]Seung-kook Jun, "Robotic Surgical Skill Assessment using Therbligs-based Motion Studies", 2012 MAE Dept. Graduate Student Research Poster Competition [PDF]

ARMies at 2012 MAE GSA Research Symposium

Ahead of a busy conference period, ARMLAB members presented their research posters at this year's 2012 MAE GSA Research Symposium. Xiaobo was presenting his current developments with cooperative cable robots while Seung-kook (a.k.a. SK) presented his work on robotic surgical skill assessment based on motion analysis methods.

This work was selected for presentation at 2012 IEEE BioROB conference held at Roma, Italy in June this year. Xiaobo will in turn present his work at 2012 ICRA (St. Paul, MN). Having received words of appreciation and encouragement from the department faculties at the research poster symposium, we wish them all the best for their presentation at the respective conferences.

Related Publications

[1] Zhou, X, Tang, C.-P., and Krovi, V., “Analysis Framework for Cooperating Mobile Cable Robots,” 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '12), Minneapolis, MN, May 14-18 2012. [BIB | RIS ]

[2] Jun, S.-K., Narayanan, M.S., Eddib, A., MD, Garimella, S., MD, Singhal, P, MD, and Krovi, V., “Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgical Skill Assessment based on Automated Video-Analysis Motion Studies”, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, Jun 24-28, 2012, Roma, Italy. [BIB | RIS]

[3] Jun, S.-K., Narayanan, M.S., Eddib, A., MD, Garimella, S., MD, Singhal, P, MD, and Krovi, V., “Evaluation of Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgical Skills using Motion Studies”, 2012 Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PerMIS'12) Workshop, March 20-22, 2012, College Park, MD. [BIB | RIS]

2012 Haptics Workshop: Come Explore the Touchy-Feely Side of Robotics

Here we are again at the 7th year of Tech Savvy- "Doing Well by Doing Good"-- the annual workshop for middle school and high school girls that took place in University at Buffalo. There were over 500 girls from many different local high schools with a "Haptics: Come Explore the Touchy-Feely Side of Robotics" Workshop from the ARMLAB once again!!!

In the hour-long workshop Dr. Krovi, Shefalika Prasad (local high school student), Ziyun Jo Zhou (REU student), Light Le and Justin Storms (undergraduates at UB) presented fundamental concepts and basics of robotics/ haptics outlining the application needs, engineering challenges and highlighting the bright future of robotics/haptics -- before the FUN and DEMONSTRATIONS began!!

One of the major highlights of this year was of course the guest speaker, Shefalika who is actually the first prize recipient at Tech Wars NCCC 2012 competition in the autonomous robot category for concept-design and fabrication of a automated robotic parking gate system. She talked about her winning project design and her parking gate system was on display which was well received by the girls who attended the workshop. Jo and Light presented their project on surgical haptic simulations that they are currently pursuing in ARMLAB and led way to interactive hands-on sessions.

The girls were very excited to try out the attractive demo applications -- needle biopsy simulator, ear surgery simulator as well as Cre8 (freeform CAD application). Working with cutting edge haptic and robotics applications, proved to be a great learning opportunity to these students. This workshop also served to provide valuable information to many others who were actually wanting to get their hands on pursuing robotics.

We thank AAUW for their continuing support. More details about the workshop and the presentations can be found at http://sites.google.com/site/techsavvyroboticsworkshop/.

Buffalo Museum of Science: Surgical Robotics and Haptic Workshop

This summer we in ARMLAB hosted a series of workshops including the most recent one which took place in the second week of August in collaboration with Buffalo Museum of Science as well UB Program Development crew. The major theme of this workshop was informed as surgical robotics and haptics. The workshop was attended by 25-30 high school students from different schools mostly within Buffalo.
The primary presenters of the workshop included Dr. Venkat Krovi, who was joined by our collaborators (Dr. Frank C Mendel, Professor in Gross Anatomical Science and Dr. Sudha Garimella, Pediatrics Nephrologist) and our very own senior doctoral students -- Seung Kook (SK) and Madu.

The workshop highlighted different aspects of robotics with interesting "eye-catchy" simulations. Later, Dr. Mendel and Dr. Garimella discussed critical issues in conducting real surgeries and needle based percutaneous procedures successfully on real-life patients.The most highlighting aspect of this workshop was the interactive session between students and clinical physicians wherein the high school kids posed really challenging and interesting questions.

After the questioning session, there were demos setup that offered the students the opportunity to get hands-on with some of the tools we developed as a part of our research including bio-mechanical simulations, needle biopsy and haptic surgical simulations. The hands-on needle insertion demos along with the biopsy visualizer (CT and ultrasound scan) application proved to be the most attractive and informative. The workshop was well received both by the organizers as well as the participants. So, the last but not the least, we would like to extend our gratitude to the Buffalo Museum of Science organizers in providing us an opportunity to conduct this outreach workshop.

A day with the Da Vinci...

As a part of our collaborative research efforts, ARMLAB members visited a local hospital facility where we got an opportunity to operate the da Vinci (dV) surgical robot The morning session started with a briefing from the surgeons about device-setup, modular options, pre-surgical system checks as well as insights from their rich experiences conducting robotic surgeries. After the discussion, each of us spent some quality time operating the dV robot and honing our "surgical skills" -- to improve tool-motion coordination between different arms of the robot, needle suturing tasks, peg-transfer. More in the days to come ....