CRAS 2016 report

 Guest post by Renata Elek

 

This year, CRAS (Joint Workshop on New Technologies for Computer/Robot Assisted Surgery) was held in Pisa, Italy. The workshop “seeks to give a clear view on the status and recent trends of assistive surgical robotic technologies. It aims to support and propose concrete measures to accelerate research and innovation in this field. CRAS originates from efforts to collaborate among European groups to achieve a critical mass in surgical robotics. As such the workshop continue on discussions started at ERF in Lyon and at ICRA in Karlsruhe, and previous meetings at Verona and Genoa. More in particular CRAS attempts to identify the steps necessary to stimulate cooperation between research and industry, across national borders and different surgical robotic projects to take advantage of the growing attention and support for research and exploitation in this interesting and growing field”.

CRAS included:

• 5 keynote speeches: the speakers were Paolo Dario from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna,
• Joel W. Burdick from California Institute of Technologies, Brian Davies from Imperial College London, Michel Brochard from European Commission, Franca Melfi from Robotic  Multispeciality  Center for Surgery, University Hospital of Pisa;
• 7 sessions with the following topics: microsurgery, endoscopy, training, interfaces and tools, novel robotic hardware, sensing & classification, segmentation and algorithms, and safety and novel applications;
• 3 poster sessions with various topics;
• 3 special events: a COSUR event, a round table and the first European meeting of the DVRK community.

Our group submitted an extended abstract to CRAS: “Feature extraction-based automated camera motion for surgical endoscopy support”, which was accepted as poster presentation. See it below!  I had to make a poster teaser about our work and the poster was shown for one full day. CRAS will be held in Montpellier, France next year.