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Event Date: May 14, 2025 (In-Person)

Table of Contents

Overview

The development of medical robots and AI is transforming the landscape of healthcare today. These tools offer several clinical advantages, such as dexterous manipulation of surgical instruments, surgical task automation, accurate digital patient models, and intraoperative tissue characterization. However, creating such systems requires the integration of AI, robots, imaging devices, and tracking equipment. This integration is a challenging barrier to entry for researchers to overcome before they can even begin innovating. Furthermore, many medical robotic systems rely on custom APIs or expensive research licenses that make them inaccessible.

Recently, several open-source platforms have gained momentum to facilitate the integration of various software and hardware components into a single system. Those platforms enable modular and component-based development for rapid prototyping, reducing the initial startup burden. Those tools can incorporate dynamic robot simulation, allowing for a seamless transition between the virtual and physical environments for testing, which is crucial for the development of intelligent and AI-driven medical robotics.

This workshop will consist of presentation and hands-on sessions. In the presentation session, we will introduce some of the open-source software and hardware platforms for prototyping image-guided robotic surgical systems. We will outline the available mechanisms for connecting complementary software environments in image-guided robotics and outline gaps, needs and opportunities. The workshop participants will be exposed to the latest efforts for the interoperability between 3D Slicer, ROS2, AMBF, Gazebo (Ignition) and the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). We will also cover various open-source tools that have been developed by the community for training and deploying AI models for surgical robotic systems.

In the tutorial session, we will present two demonstrations of systems that combine these tools for clinical applications that will showcase the interoperability between different environments. We will also help the participants to recreate the demonstrations by sharing instructions about the available repositories and docker containers.

Keywords: Image-guided interventions, Navigation, Open-source software, Software-hardware integration, Surgical CAD/CAM

Intended Audience

Researchers, engineers, and students working in the field of medical robotics and image-guided interventions are welcome to join. The tutorial sessions would be particularly useful for those who are already engaged or will be engaged in the design, implementation, and clinical translation of a system for image-guided robot-assisted interventions. For the hands-on session, we strongly recommend the audience bring their own laptop computers to follow the hands-on tutorial during the session. While the tutorial will not involve coding, some experience in running commands on a UNIX-like system and compiling open-source software using Make or CMake would be helpful.

Time Table

Time Agenda Speaker
8:00-9:00 Registration  
9:00-10:30 Session 1: AI for Surgical Robotics  
  Machine Learning with the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) Peter Kazanzides
   
  Automating Medical Needle Robots in Living Tissue: Ron Alterovitz
  Open Source Data Sets and AI Software
  Learning from Demonstration for Autonomy in Soft Alan Kuntz
  Tissue Surgery
  Towards Indirect Force Estimation via Learning-based Zonghe Chua
  Visual Proprioception in Minimally Invasive Telesurgery
  From Monocular Vision to Autonomous Action: Guiding Jie Ying Wu
  Tumor Resection via 3D Reconstruction
10:30-11:00 Break and Refreshments  
11:00-12:30 Session 2: Open Source Tools  
  Open-source medical imaging and image guided therapy Junichi Tokuda
  Open-source medical robotics Anton Deguet
  Open-source dynamic simulation Adnan Munawar
  Open-source AI development Axel Krieger
  Open-source continuum surgical robot Loris Fichera
  Panel Discussion  
12:30-13:30 Lunch  
13:30-15:00 Session 3: Demonstrations of Integrated Systems (Part 1) Mariana Bernardes
15:00-15:30 Break and Refreshments  
15:30-17:00 Session 3: Demonstrations of Integrated Systems (Part 2) Laura Connolly
17:00 Closing  

Tutorial Materials

Instructions and materials will be provided here.

Session 3 (Part 1): Creating and loading the visual/kinematic of a custom robot in 3D Slicer

In this tutorial, we will explore the basic features of SlicerROS2, including loading and visualizing URDF data in 3D Slicer, and connecting it to ROS Control.

Session 3 (Part 2): Integration of 3D Slicer with AI-based segmentation, ROS2, and AMBF

This tutorial demonstrates a more advanced use-case scenario, where an anatomical model is created in 3D Slicer and used in a dynamic simulator (AMBF) to simulate the physical interaction between a manipulator and the anatomy.

Links

References

Past Workshops

Organizers

  • Junichi Tokuda, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
  • Peter Kazanzides, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
  • Laura Connolly, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
  • Simon Leonard, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
  • Lydia Al-Zogbi, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
  • Mariana Bernardes, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
  • Anton Deguet, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
  • Axel Krieger, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
  • Pedro Moreira, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
  • Loris Fichera, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA
  • Adnan Munawar, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part by:

  • U.S. National Institutes of Health (R01EB020667, R01EB020667-05S1, R01EB020610, P41EB028741)
  • U.S. National Science Foundation (OISE-1927354, OISE-1927275)
  • Ontario Consortium for Adaptive Interventions in Radiation Oncology (OCAIRO)
  • SparKit project
  • CANARIE’s Research Software Program

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Contact

Junichi Tokuda, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Radiology Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School