Computer Vision News - January 2023

38 Congrats, Doctor Claudia! Robotic systems have an increasingly important role in facilitating minimally invasive surgical treatments. In robot-assistedminimally invasive surgery, surgeons remotely control instruments from a console to perform operations inside the patient. However, despite the advanced technological status of surgical robots, fully autonomous systems with decision- making capabilities are not yet available. Despite the technical challenges, adoption of autonomy could potentially introduce multiple benefits, such as decreasing surgeons’ workload and fatigue and pursuing a consistent quality of procedures. Ultimately, allowing the surgeons to interpret ample and intelligent information from the system will enhance the surgical outcome and positively reflect both on patients and society. During my PhD, I have addressed some of the technological challenges encountered when trying to achieve partial automation of the pick and place task of surgical objects. Three main aspects are required to introduce automation into surgery: the surgical robot mustmovewith high precision, havemotion planning capabilities, and understand the surgical scene. Besides these main factors, depending on the type of surgery, there could be other aspects that might play a fundamental role, to name some compliance, stiffness, etc. Control Claudia D’Ettorre recently finished her PhD with the Surgical Robot Vision group at University College London. Her research aimed to partially automate subtasks of robotic assisted minimally invasive surgical operations. Congrats, Doctor Claudia! Figure 1: sample of surgical tasks addressed solved with automation algorithms.