Title:  What Should a Medical Robot Look Like?

Abstract:

Many people (outside Harvard) think a medical robot is a set of very large arms for performing laparoscopic surgery. How 20th century! Real medical robots are much more diverse and come in shapes and sizes determined by both the underlying technology and clinical application. In this talk, I will describe three technologies and their clinical applications: (1) robotic catheters comprised of pre-curved elastic tubes, (2) tetherless robots powered, controlled and imaged using an MRI scanner, and (3) robotic implants that apply traction forces to induce soft tissue growth.

Biography:

Pierre E. Dupont is Chief of Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering and holder of the Edward P. Marram Chair at Boston Children’s Hospital. His research group develops robotic instrumentation and imaging technology for medical applications. He received the BS, MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA. After graduation, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. He subsequently moved to Boston University, Boston, MA, USA where he was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. He is an IEEE Fellow and his group has received a number of paper awards including the King-Sun Fu Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics in 2010, the IEEE ICRA Best Medical Robotics Paper Award in 2012 and the IEEE/RSJ IROS Best Paper Award in 2014. He is a Senior Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and is on the Advisory Board of Science Robotics.