Computer Vision News - December 2021

33 Prof. Russell Taylor (JHU) of that over time. There is a lot of interest in suturing, but personally I am a little less excited by that than with some of the other things you might ask a robot to do for you. What would the other tasks be? There are a number. Some are maybe easier. Retraction, placement of therapy, tissue resection and debridement, there are a whole bunch of things like that. Suturing is a complex skill, so if you can do that, you can do a lot of other things. There are also tools that help there. The obvious one is a stapler, where you do not suture, you staple. Intelligent retraction might be another one. I suppose there still is a lot of space for advancement in R&D in this field… Yes, of course. Some technology is just now beginning to be mature enough to be commercialized, but there is a huge development gap togo fromsomething that is proof of concept to clinical deployment. There are also things we do not know how to do and that is across the board. From the point of view of academics, what I was just telling some students the other day is it is very important to understand the whole problem. To understand in this three-way partnership what is the advantage you are trying to provide to a surgeon, or to a patient? Then to achieve that there are some things that are simply good engineering that we must do. There are some things frankly we do not yet know how to do. It is at that boundary between not knowing how to do it and it being good engineering to do it that I think the most productive academic research occurs. What is the biggest advancement that Copyright Russell Taylor - used with permission