While areas of the US such as California and the East coast have major medical centers near every population center, there are many areas, even in developed countries, with a widely dispersed patient population with significant obstacles to advanced medical care. Victims of large scale natural disasters and battlefield casualties also lack state of the art care. Telesurgery could potentially meet these needs. There is a growing interest in computational research on intelligent telesurgery. Today's telesurgery systems do not integrate with medical imaging or have intelligent functions to assist the surgeon. This project is building seven teleoperated surgical robot and surgeon-interface systems powerful and precise enough to support research on advanced robotic surgery techniques at seven major research universities. University of Washington and University of California Santa Cruz are building the seven robots and will distribute them to Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Nebraska, U.C. Berkeley, and UCLA. When completed, the seven research lab robots will be networked together for sharing of software, interoperability, and on-line telesurgery experiments.
Impact
The results of this project will enable a network of researchers to prototype advanced surgical robotics techniques, and evaluate them in realistic contexts including appropriate animal procedures. Besides new and less invasive cures, such a technology can provide easier access to care in remote parts of the US, and the developing world. The seven cooperating labs, and external partners will be able to interconnect their systems, share modules of software, and replicate each others experiments.
