Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
(CS 528)

Surgical Assistance: A Laboratory for AI and Robotics Research

Gregory D. Hager
Center for Surgical Systems and Technology
Department of Computer Science
Johns Hopkins University

November 6, 2006, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

Abstract

The goal of the Center for Surgical Systems and Technology (http://cisst.org) is to develop techniques and technology that will fundamentally change the operating room of the 21st century. Over the past eight years, this center has developed numerous systems for computer-integrated and computer assisted medical interventions. In this talk, I will argue that robotic surgical assistance provides a unique opportunity to study robotics, machine perception and human-machine interaction in circumscribed, but highly relevant applications. Using examples from our recent work on systems for the eye, throat, sinuses, and thorax, I will describe several technological and scientific problems we are tackling. These include the development of methods for creating augmented displays of the surgical field by fusing video with pre-operative imagery, control methods for human-machine cooperative control, and recent progress on recognizing surgical intent from hand motion data captured using the da Vinci surgical system.

About the Speaker

Gregory D. Hager is a Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University with joint appointment in Mechanical Engineering. He also serves as the Deputy Director of the NSF ERC for Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology. Prof. Hager received the BA degree, summa cum laude, in computer science and mathematics from Luther College in 1983, and the MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 and 1988, respectively. From 1988 to 1990, he was a Fulbright junior research fellow at the University of Karlsruhe and the Fraunhofer Institute IITB in Karlsruhe, Germany. From 1991 until 1999, he was with the Computer Science Department at Yale University. In 1999, he joined the Computer Science Department at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Hager has authored more than 150 research articles and books in the area of robotics and computer vision. His current research interests include visual tracking, vision-based control, medical robotics, and human-computer interaction. He is a fellow of the IEEE for his contributions in Vision-Based Robotics.

Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu

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