Congrats to undergraduate student Margaret Allard on the acceptance of her first-author journal paper entitled Feasibility of photoacoustic-guided teleoperated hysterectomies. This paper will appear in the Journal of Medical Imaging (JMI) Special Section on Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling.
This paper is the first to describe the feasibility of photoacoustic integration with the da Vinci surgical robot to potentially guide minimally invasive hysterectomies and other gynecological surgeries. To implement photoacoustic imaging, a novel light delivery system was designed and implemented to surround da Vinci tools. This new light delivery system uniquely enabled the investigations described in the paper, including the first known analysis of the optimal tool orientations for photoacoustic-guided hysterectomies using a da Vinci scissor tool (which partially blocks the transmitted light in some cases). This work can be extended to other da Vinci tools and laparoscopic instruments with similar tip geometry.
Margaret completed this work through her participation in our NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates in Computational Sensing and Medical Robotics.