Biography

Dr. Giulio Dagnino is a Research Associate in the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London, UK. He is currently coordinating a research team of 5 (2 postdocs, 2 PhD students, 1 clinician), and directly working on the control and real-time navigation for an image-guided robotic platform for endovascular interventions.

He received his MSc in Biomedical Engineering in 2007 from the University of Genoa, Italy, and graduated with a PhD in Medical Robotics from the Italian Institute of Technology in 2013. He then joined the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Bristol, UK in 2013 as a postdoctoral Research Fellow working on robot-assisted fracture surgery.

Giulio's main research interests are robotics and medical imaging, including control, image-guidance, surgical systems design and prototyping, integration, and translation into clinical environments. His earlier research has resulted in 13 journals, more than 20 peer-reviewed conference papers, including one IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Medical Robotics in 2016 (fracture surgery project), one Best Paper Award and 1 Best Design Award in the Surgical Robot Challenge in 2019 (endovascularintervention project), and 1 patent.

Giulio serves as a reviewer in numerous international research conferences and journals and is associate editor in the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics Journal. He is Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, and member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Abstract

The goal of modern surgical technologies is providing as much information and support to the surgical team, to produce better outcomes and improve the quality of life of patients. Integrating Robotics and Imaging in a real-time surgical platform, can have a potentially tremendous impact on the surgical outcome. Although robotics assistance is now widely used in the operating room, intraoperative medical imaging is currently limited in quality due to sub-optimal acquisition methods and limited integration with the robotic devices. Also, the integration of robotic platforms within the clinical workflow – including cooperation with the clinical team – needs to be improved. As a result, while many robotic platforms for image-guided interventions have been proposed, few have become a clinical reality.

This talk describes advances in the integration of robotics and imaging through historical perspective, and presents a case study on the design and development of a robotic platform for endovascular intervention – from the idea to in vivo application. The author uses such examples to identify future challenges in medical robotics and propose potential research directions to address them.