News

The 4th CASCADE integration week that took place in Leuven, Heverlee was a great success. From 19 to 23 January CASCADE researchers integrated their software in the CASCADE platform and collaborated on building up nice demonstrations. During the 23 January meeting presentations were given to a selection of cardiologists and cardiac surgeons - external to the project. A lot of useful feedback was obtained from the surgeons and the members from the EAB. Participants indicated their interest to set up follow-up meetings.

Medyria is offering a summer internship for excellent graduate students. Internship. Start of the internship is up to discussion, but earlier start is preferable. Please find more information on this internship here.

The proceedings of the 3rd Joint Workshop on New Technologies for Computer Robot Assisted Surgery are now available online. The proceedings can be downloaded here.

The European Surgical Robotics Demonstration Day held on 27 March 2014 was a great success!  In total 115 participants registered to the demonstration day (and more participated). In accordance to its name it was a true European event, with participants from most EU countries:

The Demonstration also received considerable coverage by print and visual media.

• National television - vrt
• Regional television - ROB
• National newspaper - Het Belang Van Limburg. 
• Online newspaper - Apache.be

The agenda of the demonstration day - including presentations provided by the speakers is listed below

10.00 – Opening of Demonstration Day – Prof. J. Vander Sloten, Dr. E. Vander Poorten, KU Leuven, Prof. K. Althoefer, Dr. H. Würdemann, King’s College London, Leonardo Mattos, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
10.30 – Demonstrations of STIFF-FLOP - µRALP - CASCADE -
11.15 – Demonstrations of STIFF-FLOP - µRALP - CASCADE –
12.00 – Demonstrations of STIFF-FLOP - µRALP - CASCADE –
13.00 – Lunch
14.00 – The Future of Robotics from a Clinical Standpoint – Dr. Alexandre Mottrie, OLV Hospital, Aalst, Belgium
14.30 – Design and Implementation of a Medical Robot System – Dr. Gernot Kronreif, Area Manager Medical Robotics, Austrian Center for Medical Innovation and Technology
15.00 – Horizon2020 and Robotics in the Work Programme – Dr. Christoph Klein - Research Programme Officer, Robotics, EU, DG Communications Networks, Content & Technology
15.30 – Coffee Break
15.50 – Notified Bodies and the CE certification Process for Medical Devices – Ir. Bart Mersseman, Product Manager Medical Devices, Notified Body, SGS
16.20 – The Past and Future of Patents: How did we get into the current mess and how could we get out again? – Prof. Dr. Herman Bruyninckx, KU Leuven, Belgium
17.00 – Reception offered by LMTC

The EU is making publicity for the jointly organised demonstration day! Indeed the European Surgical Robotics Demonstration Day is announced today on the here, on the EU's Digital Agenda.

Regional television - ROB-Tv pays attention to the open day during the European Robotics Week, covering surgical robots and CASCADE developments at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, KU Leuven. Hundreds of visitors attended demonstrations and interacted with the surgical robotic systems. The newsitem, broadcasted on Friday the 22nd can be seen below (in Dutch). The open house was a success as well. Approximately 400 visitors of all ages experimented with the different setups.

RAS-CASCADE in the news - ROB-Tv 22 Nov 2013

Details about next Hamlyn Symposium organised by Imperial College is recently published here. For more information please visit the website !

CASCADE researchers get 3rd place in poster competition at IROS' Co-SuR workshop in Tokyo Japan

Results from SCATh and CASCADE were presented at the Catheter Robotics workshop in the Hamlyn Symposium in London, UK. The catheter robotics workshop attracted a large audience and was characterised by lively interaction with audience and organisers. The overview talk that was prepared:

the entire agenda was:

• Choayang Shi, Prof. Fukuda : Simulator-based Technologies for Evaluation of Surgical Tools and Skills
• Emmanuel Vander Poorten: Further Reducing Invasiveness of Catheter Procedures through Advanced Robot Technology and Assistance – results from FP7 projects SCATh, outlook to CASCADE
• Christopher Payne : A Force Feedback System for Endovascular Catheterisation
• Giovanni Leo: A Perfect Lesion
• Colin Bicknell : In the Cath Lab Today – What is missing ?
• Panel Discussion, Robotic Endovascular Intervention: From Expensive Luxury to Clinical Necessity.

To conclude, with Chaoyang Shi, Emmanuel Vander Poorten and Giovanni Leo the CASCADE members were very active in this workshop. A similar contribution in next year's workshop is hoped for.

From 11-12-13 September 2013, CASCADE will co-organise the "3rd Joint Workshop on New Technologies for Computer/Robot Assisted Surgery" in Verona, Italy. The workshop workshop seeks to give a clear view on the status and recent trends of abovementioned assistive surgical robotic technologies and aims to propose concrete measures to achieve a critical mass in research and innovation in this field. Regardless of its popularity, the share of European technology used in clinical practice remains disproportionally small, with limited signs of improvement on the horizon. The workshop will continue the discussion started at ERF in Lyon and at ICRA in Karlsruhe and will attempt to identify the steps necessary to stimulate cooperation among the different computer and robot assisted projects and in particular seeks for the best approach to take advantage of the supposed attention of Horizon2020 to innovation.

More information can be found at http://www.cascade-fp7.eu/cras2013. Note that the workshop is already receiving attention in the media. E.g. the popular surgical robotics blog from T. Haidegger already announced our workshop at http://surgrob.blogspot.hu/2013/05/joint-eu-cis-and-surgical-robotics.html.

The CASCADE kick-off meeting took place on 24-25 April, 2013. The meeting consisted of a technical and clinical part spanning the two days of the event. Both days were extremely well organized by partner ICSTM, and more in particular, by Dr. Stamatia Giannarou (Matina) and Dr. Su-lin Lee, both under supervision of Prof. G-Z. Yang. The technical meeting on the 1^st day took place at the Hamlyn Centre of robotics. The clinical aspects of the procedure were presented in detail during the 2^nd day. To this end a program was compiled by ICSTM featuring an impressive list of top clinicians. All clinicians gave a detailed account of their lengthy expertise, together covering virtually every aspect of trans-catheter aortic valve implantation and the current clinical state-of-the-art in computer and robot-assisted catheterization. The clinical insights acquired during this unique day left a deep impression upon all the participants and provided a great direction to steer further CASCADE developments.

After opening of the General Assembly meeting, the different partners got acquainted with the project and the different tasks and challenges ahead. The management boards were installed and a first board meeting took place (see here). Diner took place on the Old Market of downtown Leuven. During the 2nd day two hands-on sessions were hold to further elaborate on the CASCADE software architecture that will be developed and to plan experiments and data gathering sessions. Also special care was paid to the design and planning of the construction of artificial test-beds that are going to be used for data gathering and system validation.

More information on this meeting can be found here at the internal part of the home page.

Since Friday February 1st researchers from KU Leuven, the University of Bremen, Imperial College London, University College London, Materialise NV, M7 Devices GmbH, Endosense SA and the Zhurcher Hochshule fur Angewandte Wissenschaften started to collaborate on technologies to perform robotic transcatheter aortic valve replacements.