Vanderbilt wins up to $12 million in funding to develop surgical robot
The funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is intended to allow surgerical procedures without human intervention.
A surgical robot capable of performing an entire surgery without human intervention: That’s the goal of a landmark, multi-institution project being led by a Vanderbilt University Engineer that recently received an award of up to $12 million in funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).
Robert J. Webster, Richard A. Schroeder Professor of Mechanical Engineering, will lead a team that includes robotics experts from the University of Utah, Johns Hopkins University and Vanderbilt, as well as surgeons from Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), to develop the breakthrough technology. The team also includes hardware and software experts from Virtuoso Surgical, a surgical robotics company co-founded by Webster and Duke Herrell, Professor of Urology and Director of VUMC’s Minimally Invasive Urologic Surgery/Robotics Program.
“Fully autonomous surgical robots will transform medicine,” Webster said. “Not only will they make routine procedures safer and more affordable, but they will also address the worldwide shortage of surgeons and expand global access to lifesaving surgeries.”
Current surgical robotic technologies rely on one of two automation techniques. The first is known as model-based automation in which procedure sequences and start-stop conditions are pre-programmed. Another method draws on machine-learning algorithms requiring enormous datasets of procedures and task sequences. While each approach has led to advances in surgical robotics, both lack scalability, generalizability, and adaptability.
“We will create brand new machine-learning algorithms beyond anything that exists today,” Webster said. “The key to making them practical is to simultaneously look at how human surgeons perform their work. What basic set of maneuvers do they use? How do they sequence those maneuvers? The answers to these questions enable effective learning on a tractable amount of data.”
Within three years, the research team hopes to demonstrate a robotic surgical device capable of removing tumors from the trachea and prostate without the intervention of a surgeon. The team also foresees this research applying to uterine fibroids, bladder tumors, spine procedures, and brain cysts, among other clinical applications. As described in the ARPA-H proposal, these would initially be demonstrated in simulated conditions and not on live patients.
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