Research

A little about our involvement with Robots

From breast cancer to special transmissions, haptics, XR and micro-bots, or 

How an obsession with MR-compatible Robotics led to innovations, research and development.

Attraction to MRI guided robotics started while still at the University of Minnesota when he designed his first MR compatible robot for performing MRI-guided minimally invasive Interventions in the breast (inspired by the story of a breast patient his mother was updating him as she was fighting the disease and his mother question whether “those people over there” can do something about it”. This early work led him to the field of interventional MRI and especially the idea of "MRI-based servoing". 

Later, as faculty of Radiology at the Washington University at St. Louis his NIH and AHA funded work was focused on MRI-guided cardiac interventions. It was also a stepping stone to the next MR robot and a plethora of technical developmental steps driven by the challenges having an MR compatible interventional instrument. Among these works were the first ever integration fo a robot with the MR scanner: the robot control was always compelling the scanner (on-the-fly).

Subsequently, at the university of Houston, his NSF-funded work focused more on the computational aspect as well as the design of new robots and haptics interfaces. Among the outcomes of this exciting era at Texas were:

• The Solid-Media Transmission Mechanism (SMT) a novel transmission mechanism invented, developed and characterized  to enable robotics inside MRI scanners (i.e. at the high permanent main magnetic fields of clinical scanners).

• Early version of our dynamic MR-based generation of a model of the area of the Procedure (AoP)

• Force-feedback pseudo-Haptic Devices for endovascular and endo-cardiac interventions with their faces generated from processing of real-time MR images of the AoP

• Rapid MR acquisition methods

• Parallel architecture MR compatible le robotic actuators

The Interventional Cardiac MRI and MIROS projects revealed that essential aspects were a framework to link the plurality of cyber and physical entities entities together, a better way to process, analyze, fuse and visualize multi-modal imaging data, and controlling the robots as well as ,,, the MR scanner! Motivated and focused by those previous research outcomes, the next CPS award further advanced the concept of such multi-faceted systems and paved the way to our  today’s research thrusts

• a versatile framework so we can add/remove hardware, software and holographic interfaces

• I learned about “computer holograms” (interestingly I was doing research as an undegrad in Physics in an optical Lab and guess what: real holograms were part of the work back then!) But today we can do them with a pierce of head mounted display (HoloLens) or ... with a tablet!

• The MR actuated ferric applicators (a wonderful engineering)

• While battling the challenges of MR robots he was exposed to the cosmos of “Low Field MRI”; a wonderland that led us to investigate Deep Learning and start reconsidering our prior innovations in face of possible transformative means of MRI-guided and Robot-assisted Interventions

Our work entails innovation and often thinking outside the box; even when you use already existing methods we most often need to adapt extensively. 

And, this work needs time and patience to come to fruition!

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