BioRob2012 in Rome

Back in June, I (partially) attended the BioRob conference in Rome, as part of the great Italian Bioengineering Week. BioRob is a more recently founded biannual conference series of the IEEE RAS and EMBS socieries. The first one was in Pisa, then Scottsdale in 2008, Tokyo 2010 and now Rome. In 2012, it was organized at the charming Angelicum Congress Center. (The same venue of ICRA2007.)

Very unfortunate that most of the surgical robotics papers were removed form the conference, and moved to a side event: a 2-day symposium  on Surgical Robotics. (Far out of the city, and for an extra fee.)

Either way, based on the publications, one can get a good update on the well-know lab's current efforts, from the Heartlander and Micron of CMU to the Eye Robot of Hopkins and the continuum robots at Vanderbilt. Excerpts from the program:

• Toward Onboard Estimation of Physiological Phase for an Epicardial Crawling Robot 
• An Endoluminal Robotic Platform for Minimally Invasive Surgery
• The Use of the Focus of Expansion for Automated Steering of Flexible Endoscopes
• Instrument-Based Calibration and Control of Intraoperative Ultrasound for Robot-Assisted Surgery
• Towards Vision-Based Control of a Handheld Micromanipulator for Retinal Cannulation in an Eyeball Phantom
• Characterization of Robotic Needle Insertion and Rotation in Artificial and Ex Vivo Tissues
• Human-Computer Interfaces for Interaction with Surgical Tools in Robotic Surgery
• An Innovative Platform for Treatment of Vascular Obstructions: System Design and Preliminary Results
• Development and Initial Testing of a General-Purpose, MR-Compatible, Manually-Actuated Manipulator for Image-Guided Interventions
• A System for 3D Ultrasound-Guided Robotic Retrieval of Foreign Bodies from a Beating Heart
• Virtual Robot: A New Teleoperation Paradigm for Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery
• Design and Evaluation of Robotic Steering of a Flexible Endoscope
• Intra-Operative Monocular 3D Reconstruction for Image-Guided Navigation in Active Locomotion Capsule Endoscopy
• Design of a Teleoperated Needle Steering System for MRI-Guided Prostate Interventions
• Miniature Tri-Axial Force Sensor for Feedback in Minimally Invasive Surgery
• Design, Development and Evaluation of a Highly Versatile Robot Platform for Minimally Invasive Single-Port Surgery
• Effect of Force Feedback on Performance of Robotics-Assisted Suturing
• A Simple and Compact Parallel Robotic Wrist for Laparoscopy
• Learning-Based Configuration Estimation of a Multi-Segment Continuum Robot           
• Study on Master Manipulator Design Parameters for Robotic Microsurgery
• Risk-Based Path Planning for a Steerable Flexible Probe for Neurosurgical Intervention
• 3D Femur Reconstruction Using a Robotized Ultrasound Probe
• Development of a Flexible Imaging Probe Integrated to a Surgical Telerobot System    

There were more sessions, plenaries, workshops, and poster presentations as well (including my ill-fated poster on patient motion compensation, guest-presented by Tom Wedlick...)