Innovations in Surgery Using Soft & Continuum Robots
Abstract: Traditional rigid link robots have revolutionized surgery in the last few decades. Today, Soft & Continuum Robots, sitting at the cutting edge of robotics research, are enabling a whole host of new surgical procedures. Soft & Continuum Robots provide great dexterity and reach through small insertion ports. They can change their shape, be deployed through tortuous paths, bend to comply with the obstacles, and still perform their task with high success. These features make these new robots perfectly suited for innovative surgical techniques like Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES), in which the surgery is performed through natural openings on the body like urethra or mouth without the need for an external incision. In this seminar, I will talk about two such minimally invasive robotic surgery applications from my research. The first one is a robotic system that performs biopsies in the lung using Steerable Needles. I will cover the journey from bench-top experiments to successful in vivo experiments for this project. Secondly, I will go over a project about performing prostate surgery via urethra using Concentric Tube Robots. I will present the new procedure we developed for suturing through rigid endoscopes and share the results of our successful experiments with anatomical models. In addition to these two projects, I will also talk about a novel Continuous Shape Sensing Technique for Soft Robots, which utilizes electrical pulses sent along the robot body. This technique enables proprioception (self-sensing of body pose) in soft robots, analogous to how an elephant knows the shape of its trunk at any given time. This sensing method paves the path for building highly accurate soft robotic surgical tools that can sense deformations along their entire body.
Biography: Tayfun Efe Ertop is a Research Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Vanderbilt University. He finished his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University in 2023. He received his M.S. and B.S. degrees from Middle East Technical University. He graduated as the valedictorian from his B.S. program. His research interests include Design, Sensing, and Control of Soft and Continuum Robots and their Applications in Surgery. He aims to solve important clinical problems through engineering and innovation with his research.