Meet Kanako Harada — Making robotic surgeons

I’m Kanako Harada, associate professor of the University of Tokyo. I belong to the Departments of Bio-Engineering and Mechanical Engineering When I was a child, I wanted to become a medical doctor, but I didn’t want to see the blood So I decided to study engineering to contribute to medicine I’m studying surgical robots for eye, pediatric and neurosurgery And we are studying automation and virtual reality simulations for the robots Surgeons have different levels of skill and we believe that automation of surgical robot can enhance the overall quality of surgery For example in current robotic surgery the robot just replicates a surgeon’s hand motion So if the surgeon is bad the surgical outcome can be bad But if we have automation of surgical robots, we can compensate for the differences among surgeons In our laboratory we have 3 professors and about 20 students, most of them are master course or undergrad students They are studying, for example, microscopic image processing and machine learning for the robotic control My name is Yuki Koyama, I’m a masters course student and I research the automation of eye surgery robots I believe automation can enhance the quality of eye surgery and automation also can reduce the risk We use virtual reality simulators to study new robotic controls because it’s efficient and we don’t want to risk the expensive equipment My name is Mikinori Kanehara, an undergraduate student, and I’m studying virtual reality simulations for robotic eye surgery The virtual reality system is useful for eye surgeons to learn how to control the robots I’m very happy when surgeons give positive comments on the students work So what makes our robots so special is we are trying to blend human skills with AI based automation We are also developing patient models to evaluate surgical robots before they are used on actual patients In future we want to do clinical research using our robots to demonstrate that we can perform more safe and accurate surgery on real patients The biggest challenge in the research domain is to understand the surgeons needs in a quantitative manner And also to evaluate surgical robots without sacrificing animals I find this field very interesting and I hope others feel the same Because this field requires knowledge of robotics, surgery and regulatory issues. It’s multidisciplinary research and it’s very fascinating In the near future I want to increase the diversity of the laboratory in terms of age, gender, nationality and research background Because the diversity is a strength in multidisciplinary research Special thanks to imPACT program of council for Science, Technology and Innovation, Cabinet Office, Government of Japan. Professor Mamoru Mitsuishi and Assistant Professor Murilo Marinho. NML lab members and research collaborators .