Description

Cancer remains the second-leading cause of death in the world. Nevertheless, survival rates are improving for many types of cancer thanks to advances in cancer prevention, screening, and treatment. Nowadays, open surgery, laparoscopic surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy are well-established surgical approaches to treat cancer. However, these therapeutic solutions are not free from invasiveness and toxicity issues.
The interest around Focused ultrasound surgery (FUS) is rapidly growing for solving these issues. Focused ultrasound surgery (FUS) is an emerging technology that requires neither incision, nor radiation, nor drug. This can potentially revolutionize the treatment of several indications, including oncological diseases. FUS can be performed on an outpatient setting, often without general anesthesia, significantly reducing the hospitalization times.
However, despite the promising results obtained in clinical studies, FUS has still moderate spread. In fact, FUS still suffers from an important drawback, the lack of flexibility in therapy delivery. Robotics could represent the enabling technology to take full advantage of focused ultrasound in surgical applications. The workshop arises from the idea to in in the same room, clinicians, engineering, experts in robotics and companies active in design and marketing of surgical devices with the aim to spread the collaboration between different communities for a new future in minimally invasive surgery.

Programme

Learning Outcomes

Focused ultrasound surgery has the potentialities to became a revolutionary treatment for several pathologies, however, technological difficulties and general scepticism are reducing its development and success. Combining experiences coming from robotics with real clinical needs, will allow to overcome these limits and accelerate the spread of FUS treatment methodology. The final aim of this workshop is the possibility to discuss together -especially involving young student – how robotics could help the FUS acceptance and how engineering could help in this process.