Professor Fischer is the William Smith Dean's Professor and a faculty member in Robotics Engineering with a appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at WPI. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2008 from Johns Hopkins University, where he was part of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Computer Integrated Surgery. At WPI he has been an integral part of developing the Robotics Engineering program and teaches primarily junior-level and graduate courses in Robotics. He is the founding director of the Automation and Interventional Medicine (AIM) Robotics Research Laboratory located on the 2nd floor of 85 Prescott with the Robotics Engineering Program. He is also the Director of the MassTech-supported PracticePoint R&D Center for translational research in healthcare cyber-physical systems located on the 3rd floor of 50 Prescott.
Medical robotics and computer integrated surgery is a multi-disciplinary field dedicated to providing as much information to a surgeon during a procedure and using that information in a way to produce better outcomes. A focus of the research in the WPI AIM Lab is on medical robotics—the link that allows us to enable "closed loop medicine" by using real time feedback to guide a surgical procedure. In order to take the most advantage of robots in surgery, we work towards integrating real-time medical imaging with the interventional procedure. The AIM Lab also supports an active research program in wearable assistive and rehabilitative robotics, as well as socially assistive robots. Professor Fischer’s research interests include medical robotics, MRI-compatible mechatronics, computer-assisted and image-guided surgery, sensors and actuator development, soft wearable devices, socially assistive robots, and robotics education.
For a full, up to date citation list of my work with links to the papers, please visit: http://aimlab.wpi.edu/publications
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NASA Tech Briefs included the WPI YouTube video, “Advancing Medical Robots at WPI” and noted, separately, how in 2015, Greg Fischer, professor of robotics engineering and mechanical engineering, along with fellow researchers built a robot that finds its way through a patient to potentially dangerous tissue, using real-time images from an MRI as a navigational guide.
The New York Times article highlights some of Prof. Greg Fischer’s work. “Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute are developing ways for machines to carefully guide surgeons’ hands as they perform particular tasks.”