Abstract

Robotics technologies have seen great success in manufacturing, where they can provide quality of workmanship and productivity superior to human workers. They have extended our abilities to explore and understand our world in ways once only dreamed of. Medical robotics and information technologies share these motivations: higher quality in surgical procedures; better, more complete, and more timely use of medical data; and treatments and therapies that would otherwise not be possible.

In the past decade, medical robotics at Carnegie Mellon has grown from a single laboratory to one of the strongest academic research groups. Borrowing from and building upon heritage technologies developed through decades of robotics research in other application domains, new approaches to diagnosis, surgery, patient care, rehabilitation and assisted living are being developed and applied clinically. Our research includes:

• Smart medical and diagnosis tools, such as functional microsurgical instruments, handheld diagnostic equipment, and wearable health status monitors with embedded intelligence;
• 2D and 3D medical image analysis and informatics, including techniques to combine imaging modalities, automatically identify anatomical features and organize enormous medical image databases; and
• Information-aided surgery, including navigational aids, surgical assistance devices, surgical robots and virtual reality displays.

Speaker Biographies

Branislav Jaramaz (PhD, Civil Engineering, Carnegie Mellon, 1992) is a Research Scientist in the Robotics Institute and Associate Director of the Institute for Computer Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery at the Western Pennsylvania Hospital. His primary interests are in computational biomechanics and computational geometry and applications in computer assisted surgery, medical planning, simulation and analysis. His current work in computer assisted surgery involves development of new image guided surgical systems and applications. In the area of biomechanical engineering and computational mechanics, his interests include NURBS-based description of anatomical structures, simulation of joint motion after total hip arthroplasty and development of robust methods for patient-specific biomechanical models. In the area of computational geometry, he is developing tools for automatic and semi-automatic segmentation of medical images, 3D ultrasound, and deformable registration of medical images.

Jonas August (PhD, Electrical Engineering, Yale University, 2001) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon. His research interests are geometry and uncertainty in computer vision and medical imaging, particularly for the sake of improving image quality. He is interested in organizing images into discrete objects for which he is applying the tools of Markov processes and random fields to derive algorithms from first principles. Some of his earlier research built models of the local geometry of curves that can in turn be used to identify vascular structures even in low quality medical images. He is currently exploring the use of probabilistic techniques for removing the often catastrophic streaking artifacts in X-ray CT scans and parallel techniques for tomography computation.

Kim Hebsgaard, M.D., is a Research Fellow in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Surgery and a Visiting Research Faculty Member at the Robotics Institute.