Seminar: Concentric tube continuum robots – from heart valve repair to brain tumor surgery, Prof Pierre E. Dupont, Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Abstract:

Concentric tube robots are comprised of telescoping precurved superelastic tubes. Their shape is controlled by rotating and translating the tubes with respect to each other at their base. With diameters of 1-4mm, they are well suited for minimally invasive medical applications.  Invented just over a decade ago, the theory for designing, modeling and controlling these robots is now well developed and recent work has focused on identifying the best clinical applications for this technology. This talk will cover two applications investigated in my lab. The first employs a concentric tube robot as a cardiac catheter for performing heart valve repair. Here, we demonstrate autonomous control of catheter navigation inside the heart through in vivo experiments. The second application explores the use of concentric tube robots as arms for bimanual single-port systems. This application is evaluated in the context of endoscopic neurosurgery where we define a set of bimanual tasks associated with tumor removal and compare standard single-tool endoscopy with the two-armed robot system.

Biography:

Pierre E. Dupont is Chief of Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering and holder of the Edward P. Marram Chair at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is also a Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. His research group develops robotic instrumentation and imaging technology for medical applications. He received the BS, MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA. After graduation, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. He subsequently moved to Boston University, Boston, MA, USA where he was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. He is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the Advisory Board for Science Robotics.