IEEE ICRA 2022 Workshop on Human-centered Autonomy in Medical Robotics

Date: 23 May 2022 - Time: 8:15 AM - 6:00 PM ET

POSTER SUBMISSION LINK: Click HERE

Organizers:

Focus:

Considering the significant impact of artificial intelligence on various aspects of our society, one imaginable future horizon of healthcare is when autonomous agents are deployed to automate several aspects of care delivery under the high-level and possibly remote supervision of a care provider. Of course, the more sensitive the delivery of care, the vaguer that horizon would be. However, recent advances in the area of autonomous surgery, autonomous rehabilitation robots, and man-machine interfaces used in bionic limbs, illustrate strong evidence for the upcoming future. As a result, it is imperative to discuss the feasibility, reliability, resiliency of these technologies besides the ethical aspects of automation using AI and robotics in healthcare. The questions are: “how can we de-bias and diversify an intelligent robot used for care delivery?” and “how can we make these technologies, robust, reliable, resilient, and co-adaptable while having minimal, direct, and high-level interference and supervision from a healthcare provider?” This is the core focus of this workshop.

Workshop Vision:

It can be mentioned that incorporating appropriate levels of automation in systems for healthcare delivery has great potential to enhance surgical and therapeutic outcomes by utilizing the advantages offered by the fusion of robotics, artificial intelligence, human-machine interfacing modules. Incorporating automation in healthcare delivery can lower the mental and physical loads on surgeons and therapists while improving the reliability, repeatability, precision, and possibly the safety of the interventions for patients. Automation also maximizes the accessibility to advanced care delivery regardless of geographical barriers, and this would diversify the access to high-quality care delivery. Autonomous systems can make it possible for a surgeon or therapist to provide high-level supervisory comments focusing on the best planning of therapy while allowing the low-level tasks (which have more mechanical or physical context) to be (re)produced by the machines. Regardless of the specific intervention, the overarching objective of incorporating automation in healthcare delivery is to intelligently combine the capabilities and field-knowledge of humans with the precision, power, repeatability, accuracy, and fast multimodal decision-making capabilities of machines. However, there are concerns, in particular regarding ethical aspects, reliability, and resiliency of automation modules, which should be systematically investigated.

Workshop Mission:

We will discuss how AI and automated robotics can reformulate the delivery of surgery, rehabilitation therapy, through automation, and can rigorously augment the physical assistance delivery to people with the lack of a biological limb? How autonomous systems for surgical or therapeutic interventions have the potential to make those interventions more standardized in terms of efficiency, accuracy, accessibility, and reliability through the integration of machine intelligence, automatic control, image guidance, speech processing, and auditory assistance, deep bio-signal processing, medical data mining, enhanced visualization, and of novel mechanisms? And home human-machine interaction research supports incorporating autonomy in healthcare technologies by harnessing and leveraging information and data?

Topics:

Workshop Focus: The proposed workshop is motivated by the recognition in recent years that automation technologies incorporating developments in robotics, wearable systems, and intelligent systems have excellent potential to meet the demands of healthcare systems for more efficient, cost-effective, and reliable performance of surgeries and therapies and physical assistance. The foci of this special issue are given below

• Automation in Surgical Robotic Domain

• Automation in Rehabilitation Robotic Domain

• Automation in NeuroRobotic and Prosthetic Domain

• Human-Machine Interfacing, Interaction, and Integration for Automation

• Supervised Robot Learning for Delivering Healthcare Services

• Ethics in Automation of Healthcare Delivery

• Debiasing AI used for automation of healthcare

Tentative schedule: The workshop will be started with a brief overview of the topics to give a big picture of the event. The workshop will be continued by 12 confirmed invited talks. The duration of each talk is 25 minutes including a 5-minute Q&A. Two poster/video/demo sessions will be held. A round-table discussion and Q&A session will be considered for the end of the workshop. The time is in Eastern Time.

[08:15 -- 8:30] - Introductions, Opening Discussions

[08:30 -- 08:55] - Marcia O’Malley, Rice University, USA

[08:55 -- 9:20] - Jee-Hwan Ryu, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea

[9:20 -- 09:45] - Tamar Makin, University College London, UK

[9:45 -- 10:30] - Coffee Break and Poster Session

[10:30 -- 10:55] - Elena De Momi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

[10:55 -- 11:20] - Ilana Nisky, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

[11:20 -- 11:45] - Paolo Robuffo Giordano, CNRS at IRISA, Rennes, France

[11:45 -- 13:00] - Lunch Break

[13:00 – 13:25] - Mario Selvaggio, Università degli studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy

[13:25 -- 13:50] - Antonia Tzemanaki, University of Bristol, UK

[13:50 -- 14:15] - James H Chandler, University of Leeds, UK

[14:15 -- 14:40] - Guy Avraham, University of California, Berkeley, USA

[14:40 -- 15:20] Elevator Pitches for Posters

[15:20 -- 16:10] Poster/Video/Demo Session

[16:10 -- 16:35] - S. Farokh Atashzar, New York University, USA

[16:35 -- 17:00] - Mahdi Tavakoli, University of Alberta, Canada

[17:00 – 17:50] - Round-table Discussions

[17:50 -- 18:00] - Conclusion Marks and Closing

Accepted Posters:

• Practical Validation of Autonomous Surgical Tasks by: Tamas D. Nagy, and Tamas Haidegger

• Toward an Autonomous Robotics Solution for Spillage-free Specimen Retrieval in Minimally Invasive Surgery, by Siqin Dong, Michel Audette, Eric Feliberti, and Krishnanand Kaipa

• Forearm Ultrasound Images can be Classified to Predict Static American Sign Language Letters, by Keshav Bimbraw, Jack Rothenberg, Haichong Zhang

• DIAS: Delay Impervious semi-Autonomous Surgery, by Glebys Gonzalez, Mythra V. Balakuntala, Mridul Agarwal, Md Masudur Rahman, Vaneet Aggarwal, Yexiang Xue, Richard M. Voyles, Juan Wachs

• Local and global feature fusion for ultrasound image quality assessment: Towards autonomous robotic ultrasound, Deepak Raina, Mythra Balakuntala, Richard Voyles, Subir Kumar Saha

• Open-source Force Sensors for Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery Research, Zonghe Chua, Allison M. Okamura

• Toward Steerable Needles Autonomous Motion for Mitral Valve Repair, Mattia Magro, Andrea Fortuna, Xiu Zhang, Maria Chiara Palumbo, Emiliano Votta, Elena De Momi and Alice Segato