Conference Program of WCICA 2012

WCICA 2012
Plenary Lectures
Plenary Lecture III
10:50-11:50, Friday, July 6, 2012
Room 305, Third Floor, Beijing International Convention Center
Surgical Robotics: Different Successful Concepts
in the Past and in Future
Professor Tim C. Lueth
Technical University of Munich
Germany
Chair: Prof. Max Q.-H. Meng (Chinese University of Hong Kong, China)
Abstract
Since 20 years, surgical navigation and robotics are two important technologies to improve the state of
the art in medical treatment. To know where an instrument is located relative to a region of interest (organ,
vessel, bone structure) inside of the body is of great importance to achieve a preplanned postoperative
situation. To guide and to move an instrument by a robot is more complex but is definitely required for
almost all kind of surgery.
While surgical navigation became a standard in many medical disciplines, surgical robotics is still at
it’s beginning. Todays great commercial success of only one company with just one robotics approach
(Telemanipulation), should not mislead to an interpretation that surgical robotics is now successful. There
are still more problems than solutions. Also the visibility of this company is not typical for medical device
companies. In the talk, several navigation and robotics systems are presented, that were developed within
Germany during the past 15 years with different success. All of them skipped the barrier from idea to
clinical use to the market. A collection of videos shows the robots use.
Nevertheless, there are different mechanisms that are important to consider if a medical robot should
be successful. These mechanisms are discussed and also the rules for researcher to design robots as
medical device from the very beginning. Also some in-between solutions such as “Navigated Control” are
presented to explain when a robot is useful and why sometimes a different solution is more successful.
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