Title: Continuum Robots for Minimally Invasive Surgery
Abstract: Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is a surgical technique that aims to minimize the trauma caused to patients by using small incisions and specialized instruments. In MIS, endoluminal procedures, where interventions are performed within the body’s natural passageways, and soft-tissue procedures often require continuum robots, which are particularly valuable in these cases as they can navigate tortuous anatomical structures and provide enhanced access to target sites. However, manual control of these devices is often very unintuitive and uncomfortable for clinicians. Therefore, introducing robotics and autonomy to them becomes vital to further advance surgical capabilities. In this talk, I will cover key technology requirements for introducing autonomy to continuum robots used in minimally invasive procedures. The methods I will cover include shape sensing and tip tracking based on fiber Bragg gratings to provide accurate localization, modeling techniques to understand the tendon-actuated telescoping robot’s mechanics, and path-following control to guide the steerable needle’s movements. I will also present algorithmic catheter design and robotic catheter control for the specific procedure of transcatheter mitral chordae replacement in the beating heart alongside the first robotic neurosurgical platform in the literature, able to deliver an implantable steerable needle for a range of diagnostic and therapeutic applications, with a short-term focus on localized drug delivery.
Bio: Abdulhamit Donder is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital & Harvard Medical School. He received his B.Sc. degree in mechanical engineering with the highest ranking in the faculty of engineering from Uludağ University, Bursa, Türkiye, in 2014, for which he spent a term enrolled at the Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy. Then in 2017, he received his M.Sc. degree in mechanical engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Türkiye. In his PhD, which he completed in 2022 at the Mechatronics in Medicine Laboratory, Imperial College London, U.K., he worked on full 3-D sensing and motion control methods of robotic steerable needles used in neurosurgery. His current research involves investigating design and control techniques for tendon-driven telescoping catheters used in cardiac interventions.