EL.I.S.A. project

A collaboration between three Italian research institutes supported by ARS Project

EL.I.S.A.: Electric Impedance Sensing in Surgical Applications

Altair Robotics Lab, IIT and NearLab working together to integrate advance sensing capabilities into surgical robotic tools.
EL.I.S.A. – Electric Impedance Sensing in Surgical Applications – is the result of a collaboration between Altair Robotics Lab (University of Verona), IIT (Italian Institute of Technology, Genova) and NearLab (Politecnico di Milano) and it has been partially funded by the ARS and the SMARTSurg projects.

The main goal of this research activity is to integrate advance sensing capabilities into surgical robotic tools.

The advance sensing is based on a compact embedded bio-electric impedance measurement device that could be integrated with minimum hardware modification in standard surgical tools.

Thanks to impedance measurements, an autonomous robotic system will be able to recognize the contact with different tissue types and in different conditions (e.g. healthy and pathological areas in the same tissue or organ). This information could be of enormous importance in the correct autonomous execution of complex surgical procedures, when visual data are not providing enough information for the robust detection and reconstruction of actual patient conditions.

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TEAM

 

University of Verona
Diego Dall’Alba
Paolo Fiorini

 

IIT (Italian Institute of Technology)
Zhuoqi Cheng
Darwin Caldwell
Leonardo Mattos

 

Near Lab
Simone Foti
Andrea Mariani
Thibaud Chupin
Elena De Momi
Giancarlo Ferrigno

RECOGNITIONS

 

Hamlyn Surgical Robotic Challenge 2018 – among the 10 finalists invited to present the work during the Hamlyn Symposium 2018

CRAS 2018 workshop – Best Paper Award

 

PUBLICATIONS

 

Design and integration of electrical bio-impedance sensing in surgical robotic tools for tissue identification

Zhuoqi Cheng, Diego Dall’Alba, Simone Foti, Andrea Mariani, Thibaud Chupin, Darwin Caldwell, Paolo Fiorini, Elena De Momi, Giancarlo Ferrigno and Leonardo Mattos

Advanced User Interface for Augmented Information Display on Endoscopic Surgical Images

Simone Foti, Andrea Mariani, Thibaud Chupin, Diego Dall’Alba, Zhuoqi Cheng, Leonardo Mattos, Darwin Caldwell, Paolo Fiorini, Elena De Momi and Giancarlo Ferrigno