A Colorado man made history at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) this summer when he became the first bilateral shoulder-level amputee to wear and simultaneously control two of the Laboratory’s Modular Prosthetic Limbs.

Most importantly, Les Baugh, who lost both arms in an electrical accident 40 years ago, was able to operate the system by simply thinking about moving his limbs, performing a variety of tasks during a short training period. These Prosthetic Robot Arms are opening gates to new human cyborgs.

One other DARPA-funded robotic limb controlled by thoughts alone — actually make that two, because Colorado man Les Baugh had two bionic arms attached from shoulder level. Baugh got them this summer, 40 years after losing both arms, as part of a Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program test run at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The project’s researchers have been developing these Modular Prosthetic Limbs (MPL) over the past decade, but they say Baugh is the “first bilateral shoulder-level amputee” to wear two MPLs at the same time. Unlike Jan Scheuermann who controlled a robotic arm with a pair of neural implants, though, Baugh had to undergo a procedure called targeted muscle reinnervation, which reassigned the nerves that once controlled his arms and hands.

Once that was done, the team recorded the patterns his brain makes for each muscle he moves, and then they had him control virtual arms to prepare for the real things. Since his arms were cut off from the shoulder, they also had to design a custom socket for his torso where the prosthetics can be attached. All their preparations were worth it in the end, though, as Baugh turned out to be a brilliant test subject: after just 10 days of training, he was already moving cups from one shelf to the other just by thinking it.

Resources

© 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory LLC. All rights reserved.

http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/2014/141216.asp

http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/18/double-amputee-mind-controlled-robot-arms/

The post HUMAN WITH 2 BIONIC ARMS appeared first on Robotpark ACADEMY.

Surgery to relieve the damaging pressure caused by hemorrhaging in the brain is a perfect job for a robot. That is the basic premise of a new image-guided surgical system under development at Vanderbilt University. It employs steerable needles about the size of those used for biopsies to penetrate the brain with minimal damage and suction away the blood clot that has formed.The system is described in an article accepted for publication in the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. It is the product of an ongoing collaboration between a team of engineers and physicians headed by Assistant Professor Robert J. Webster III and Assistant Professor of Neurological Surgery Kyle Weaver.

Brain clots are leading cause of death, disability

The odds of a person getting an intracerebral hemorrhage are one in 50 over his or her lifetime. When it does occur, 40 percent of the individuals die within a month. Many of the survivors have serious brain damage.
“When I was in college, my dad had a brain hemorrhage,” said Webster. “Fortunately, he was one of the lucky few who survived and recovered fully. I’m glad I didn’t know how high his odds of death or severe brain damage were at the time, or else I would have been even more scared than I already was.”

Steerable needle could prevent “collateral damage” during surgery
Operations to “debulk” intracerebral hemorrhages are not popular among neurosurgeons: They know their efforts are not likely to make a difference, except when the clots are small and lie on the brain’s surface where they are easy to reach. Surgeons generally agree that there is a clinical benefit from removing 25-50 percent of a clot but that benefit can be offset by the damage that is done to the surrounding tissue when the clot is removed. Therefore, when a serious clot is detected in the brain, doctors take a “watchful waiting” approach – administering drugs that decrease the swelling around the clot in hopes that this will be enough to make the patient improve without surgery.

For the last four years, Webster’s team has been developing a steerable needle system for “transnasal” surgery: operations to remove tumors in the pituitary gland and at the skull base that traditionally involve cutting large openings in a patient’s skull and/or face. Studies have shown that using an endoscope to go through the nasal cavity is less traumatic, but the procedure is so difficult that only a handful of surgeons have mastered it.

Last summer, Webster attended a conference in Italy where one of the speakers, Marc Simard, a neurosurgeon at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, ran through his wish list of useful imaginary neurosurgical devices, hoping that some engineer in the audience might one day be able to build one of them. When he described his wish to have a needle-sized robot arm to reach deep into the brain to remove clots, Webster couldn’t help smiling because the steerable needle system he had been developing was perfect for the job.

Webster’s design, which he calls an active cannula, consists of a series of thin, nested tubes. Each tube has a different intrinsic curvature. By precisely rotating, extending and retracting these tubes, an operator can steer the tip in different directions, allowing it to follow a curving path through the body. The single needle system required for removing brain clots was actually much simpler than the multi-needle transnasal system.

I think this can save a lot of lives.When Webster returned, he told Weaver about the potential new application. The neurosurgeon was quite supportive: “I think this can save a lot of lives. There are a tremendous number of intracerebral hemorrhages and the number is certain to increase as the population ages.”

Graduate student Philip Swaney, who is working on the system, likes the fact it is closest to commercialization of all the projects in Webster’s Medical and Electromechanical Design Laboratory. “I like the idea of working on something that will begin saving lives in the very near future,” he said.

Active cannula removed 92 percent of clots in simulations
The brain-clot system only needs two tubes: a straight outer tube and a curved inner tube. Both are less than one twentieth of an inch in diameter. When a CT scan has determined the location of the blood clot, the surgeon determines the best point on the skull and the proper insertion angle for the probe. The angle is dialed into a fixture, called a trajectory stem, which is attached to the skull immediately above a small hole that has been drilled to enable the needle to pass into the patient’s brain.

The surgeon positions the robot so it can insert the straight outer tube through the trajectory stem and into the brain. He also selects the small inner tube with the curvature that best matches the size and shape of the clot, attaches a suction pump to its external end and places it in the outer tube.

Guided by the CT scan, the robot inserts the outer tube into the brain until it reaches the outer surface of the clot. Then it extends the curved, inner tube into the clot’s interior. The pump is turned on and the tube begins acting like a tiny vacuum cleaner, sucking out the material. The robot moves the tip around the interior of the clot, controlling its motion by rotating, extending and retracting the tubes. According to the feasibility studies the researchers have performed, the robot can remove up to 92 percent of simulated blood clots.

“The trickiest part of the operation comes after you have removed a substantial amount of the clot. External pressure can cause the edges of the clot to partially collapse making it difficult to keep track of the clot’s boundaries,” said Webster. The goal of a future project is to add ultrasound imaging combined with a computer model of how brain tissue deforms to ensure that all of the desired clot material can be removed safely and effectively.

Source

By David Salisbury, Vanderbilt University

Links

http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/robotics/newsid=31772.php#ixzz2bVYo7TZe

The post Medical Robots – Treat Brain Clots 11108 appeared first on Robotpark ACADEMY.

Video Link:

http://youtu.be/2Ysb-Oko3Bg

The post ROBOTIC SUIT for ELDERLY PEOPLE 31033 appeared first on Robotpark ACADEMY.

With less than a 0.5 mm margin of error, Neuroglide, the robot developed by researchers in the robotics lab, allows for the placement of screws in small vertebrae with unequaled precision. KB Medical is the start-up being founded to get this product on the market.

The post EPFL Operation Robot 11092 appeared first on Robotpark ACADEMY.

Da Vinci robots operate in several thousand hospitals worldwide, with an estimated 200,000 surgeries conducted in 2012, most commonly for hysterectomies and prostate removals.By January 2013, more than 2,000 units had been sold worldwide. The “Si” version of the system costs on average slightly under US$2 million, in addition to several hundred thousand dollars of annual maintenance fees.

Overview of the System

The da Vinci System consists of a surgeon’s console that is typically in the same room as the patient, and a patient-side cart with four interactive robotic arms controlled from the console.

-Three of the arms are for tools that hold objects, and can also act as scalpels, scissors, bovies, or unipolar or bipolar electrocautery instruments.
-The fourth arm carries an endoscopic camera with two lenses that gives the surgeon full stereoscopic vision from the console.

The surgeon sits at the console and looks through two eye holes at a 3D image of the procedure, while maneuvering the arms with two foot pedals and two hand controllers. The da Vinci System scales, filters and translates the surgeon’s hand movements into more precise micro-movements of the instruments, which operate through small incisions in the body.

To perform a surgical procedure, the surgeon must first use the system’s weight to judge how hard it should work. Then he/she uses the console’s master controls to maneuver the patient-side cart’s three or four robotic arms (depending on the model). The instruments’ jointed-wrist design exceeds the natural range of motion of the human hand; motion scaling and tremor reduction further interpret and refine the surgeon’s hand movements. The da Vinci System always requires a human operator, and incorporates multiple redundant safety features designed to minimize opportunities for human error when compared with traditional approaches.

The da Vinci System has been designed to improve upon conventional laparoscopy, in which the surgeon operates while standing, using hand-held, long-shafted instruments, which have no wrists. With conventional laparoscopy, the surgeon must look up and away from the instruments, to a nearby 2D video monitor to see an image of the target anatomy. The surgeon must also rely on his/her patient-side assistant to position the camera correctly. In contrast, the da Vinci System’s ergonomic design allows the surgeon to operate from a seated position at the console, with eyes and hands positioned in line with the instruments. To move the instruments or to reposition the camera, the surgeon simply moves his/her hands.

Advantages

By providing surgeons with superior visualization, enhanced dexterity, greater precision and ergonomic comfort, the da Vinci Surgical System makes it possible for more surgeons to perform minimally invasive procedures involving complex dissection or reconstruction. For the patient, a da Vinci procedure can offer all the potential benefits of a minimally invasive procedure, including less pain, less blood loss and less need for blood transfusions. Moreover, the da Vinci System can enable a shorter hospital stay, a quicker recovery and faster return to normal daily activities.

Video Links:

Youtube Link: http://youtu.be/pxInFn047js
Youtube Link: http://youtu.be/Kq-_riKtzsY

The post DA VINCI Medical Robot Demonstration 11091 appeared first on Robotpark ACADEMY.

The da Vinci Surgical System is a robotic surgical system made by the American company Intuitive Surgical. It is designed to facilitate complex surgery using a minimally invasive approach, and is controlled by a surgeon from a console. The system is commonly used for prostatectomies, and increasingly for cardiac valve repair and gynecologic surgical procedures. According to the manufacturer, the da Vinci System is called “da Vinci” in part “because Leonardo da Vinci invented the first robot“, as discovered by Mario Taddei. Da Vinci also used anatomical accuracy and three-dimensional details in his works.

Da Vinci robots operate in several thousand hospitals worldwide, with an estimated 200,000 surgeries conducted in 2012, most commonly for hysterectomies and prostate removals.By January 2013, more than 2,000 units had been sold worldwide. The “Si” version of the system costs on average slightly under US$2 million, in addition to several hundred thousand dollars of annual maintenance fees.

Overview of the System

The da Vinci System consists of a surgeon’s console that is typically in the same room as the patient, and a patient-side cart with four interactive robotic arms controlled from the console.

-Three of the arms are for tools that hold objects, and can also act as scalpels, scissors, bovies, or unipolar or bipolar electrocautery instruments.
-The fourth arm carries an endoscopic camera with two lenses that gives the surgeon full stereoscopic vision from the console.

The surgeon sits at the console and looks through two eye holes at a 3D image of the procedure, while maneuvering the arms with two foot pedals and two hand controllers. The da Vinci System scales, filters and translates the surgeon’s hand movements into more precise micro-movements of the instruments, which operate through small incisions in the body.

To perform a surgical procedure, the surgeon must first use the system’s weight to judge how hard it should work. Then he/she uses the console’s master controls to maneuver the patient-side cart’s three or four robotic arms (depending on the model). The instruments’ jointed-wrist design exceeds the natural range of motion of the human hand; motion scaling and tremor reduction further interpret and refine the surgeon’s hand movements. The da Vinci System always requires a human operator, and incorporates multiple redundant safety features designed to minimize opportunities for human error when compared with traditional approaches.

The da Vinci System has been designed to improve upon conventional laparoscopy, in which the surgeon operates while standing, using hand-held, long-shafted instruments, which have no wrists. With conventional laparoscopy, the surgeon must look up and away from the instruments, to a nearby 2D video monitor to see an image of the target anatomy. The surgeon must also rely on his/her patient-side assistant to position the camera correctly. In contrast, the da Vinci System’s ergonomic design allows the surgeon to operate from a seated position at the console, with eyes and hands positioned in line with the instruments. To move the instruments or to reposition the camera, the surgeon simply moves his/her hands.

Advantages

By providing surgeons with superior visualization, enhanced dexterity, greater precision and ergonomic comfort, the da Vinci Surgical System makes it possible for more surgeons to perform minimally invasive procedures involving complex dissection or reconstruction. For the patient, a da Vinci procedure can offer all the potential benefits of a minimally invasive procedure, including less pain, less blood loss and less need for blood transfusions. Moreover, the da Vinci System can enable a shorter hospital stay, a quicker recovery and faster return to normal daily activities.

Links:

Youtube Video Link: http://youtu.be/NwGnrP_6PFM

The post DA VINCI SURGICAL SYSTEM ROBOT 11090 appeared first on Robotpark ACADEMY.