Carlo Seneci - Bjoern Eiben

Carlo Seneci - Title - Design and Manufacturing of Surgical Robots - PhD and Beyond

Abstract:

Today's manufacturing and rapid prototyping technologies provide many instruments and techniques to produce surgical robots and instrumentation. This allows designers to have a large number of options to choose from, in order to fine-tune their design with the best quality at the minor cost possible. During his PhD work, Carlo explored many different solutions on how to produce surgical robots for a wide variety of surgical applications, from brain surgery to flexible endoscopic surgery. During his talk, Carlo will present what are the main challenges that a surgical robot designer has to face. These span from the right choice of hardware construction techniques to material biocompatibility and sterilisation. The talk will also go through some of the main design guidelines on how to design and build a surgical robot and what smart solutions can be implemented to increase its usefulness and practicality of use.

Bio:

I'm currently a Post-Doc at University College London - Weiss Lab under the supervision of Dr Christos Bergeles and I work on the design and construction of robotic surgical instruments for ophthalmic surgery. I obtained my PhD in Robotic Surgery in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. Guang-Zhong Yang and Prof. Ara Darzi at the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery. The PhD was focused on the design of a robotic platform for endoluminal surgery. Before moving to U.K. I graduated in industrial automation engineering. During this time I developed an interest in medical robotics, working on student projects for surgical rehabilitation. After the master degree, I worked for a period in the design and consulting industry. This allowed me to professionally grow and be ready to apply my skills to a field such as surgical robotics. My research aim is to improve current robotic technology from mainly the hardware perspective. In fact, I have interests in changing the manufacturing paradigm to favour easy production and assembly of robots, while adopting smart solutions such as force sensing. For my professional growth, I aim to continue working on the miniature and micromechanical design, additive manufacturing, FEM analysis, programming and system integration, and in mathematical modelling and control.

Bjoern Eiben -  Title - Motion models for lung cancer radiotherapy on an MR-Linac

Abstract:

MR-Linac technology allows real-time MR imaging during lung cancer radiotherapy. This offers exciting possibilities for precise dose delivery to the tumour via tracking, even in the presence of breathing motion since the internal patient anatomy can be measured during treatment. Precise dose delivery however is only the first step. Equally important is to spare healthy tissues and other organs at risk from radiation, as well as knowledge about delivered dose for adaptive treatment and re-planning. This requires temporally resolved, high quality images of the 3d patient anatomy which is difficult to capture with MRI directly. Here motion models could become an important tool to provide images with both, high spatial and temporal resolution.

In my talk I will first give an overview of a study where we investigated several algorithms to identify tumour motion in 2d cine-MR images. Thereafter I will show examples where we successfully applied the unified motion modelling, registration and image reconstruction framework developed at CMIC to reconstruct high resolution images and motion from 2d MR slices. Lastly I will address challenges due to sliding motion and outline a solution that is tailored towards our motion modelling framework.