Supervised Autonomous Robotics Renal Tumor Surgery (SARRTS) - The future of surgery is likely to be shaped by several technological innovations that aim to improve health outcomes for patients. Our long term goal is to develop a robotic platform for supervised soft tissue tumor resection guided by multimodality sensing techniques and tumor-specific molecular markers. This platform would be a major step in moving towards autonomous robotic procedures in the future. While this proposal focuses on kidney tumor resection, the demonstration platform we will develop will be broadly applicable to other cancer surgeries and multiple other operative procedures. We envision that supervised robotic execution of a surgical task, incorporating multimodality sensing, will perform tumor resection with better accuracy, consistency, and safety over the current standard of care. Multimodality sensing will include pre-operative 3D surgical planning using tomographic images such as CT or MRI, intraoperative reconstruction and contextual positioning, as well as real-time identification of critical anatomy such as vascular structures, peripheral nerves, ducts and tissue perfusion. Supervised robotic surgery utilizing improved sensing/imaging has the potential to enable access to expert surgical techniques in remote regions that do not have access to the same medical expertise as large urban environments. This work will develop new strategies for kidney cancer surgery as a “proof of concept” and has the potential to decrease morbidity and improve surgical outcomes. Our ultimate vision is to be able to execute autonomous robotic renal tumor surgery via laparoscopic techniques in human patients. To move towards this long-term goal, we envision a series of interim milestones, starting with realistic kidney phantoms in this project. The work will consist of the following four tasks: Task 1: Develop workflow and planning workstation Task 2: Robotic system development and validation Task 3: Phantom creation and tumor model development Task 4: Demonstration of partial nephrectomy using robotic system
