In current robotic surgery, dexterity is enhanced by microprocessor controlled mechanical wrists, which allow motion scaling for reducing gross hand movements and improved performance of micro-scale tasks. The continuing evolution of the technology, including force feedback and virtual immobilization through real-time motion adaptation, will permit more complex procedures such as beating heart surgery to be carried out under a static frame-of-reference. Under the dichotomy of autonomous and manipulator technologies in robotics, intelligence of the robot is typically pre-acquired through high-level abstraction and environment modelling. For procedures that involve complex anatomy and large tissue deformation, however, this is known to create major difficulties. The regulatory, ethical and legal barriers imposed on interventional surgical robots also give rise to the need of a tightly integrated control between the operator and the robot when autonomy is being pursued. The aim of this talk is to present a new concept of perceptual docking for robotic control. The word docking is different in meaning to the conventional term used in mobile robots. It represents a fundamental paradigm shift of perceptual learning and knowledge acquisition for robotic systems in that operator specific motor and perceptual/cognitive behaviour is assimilated in situ through sensing and a gaze contingent framework. We will demonstrate how saccadic eye movements and ocular vergence can be used for attention selection and recovering 3D motion and deformation of the soft tissue during MIS procedures. It will also cover our current progresses on dynamic active constraints, integrated sensing for smart end-effector design, kinematics and actuation for NOTES, and high fidelity patient-specific VR modelling and augmented reality for surgical navigation.

Professor Guang-Zhong Yang received Ph.D. in Computer Science from Imperial College London and served as a senior and then principal scientist of the Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Unit of the Royal Brompton Hospital prior to assuming his current full-time academic post. He holds the chair for Medical Image Computing at Imperial College and is Director of Medical Imaging and Robotics, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, founding Director of the Royal Society/Wolfson Medical Image Computing Laboratory, and co-founder of the Wolfson Surgical Technology Laboratory at Imperial College. He was also Chairman of the Imperial College Imaging Sciences Centre. Professor Yang's research has been focussed on Robotics, Sensing, and Medical Imaging. He coined the term Perceptual Docking in robotics, pioneered the field of Body Sensor Networks (BSN), and received a number of international awards in medical imaging including the I.I. Rabi Award from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and the Research Merit Award from the Royal Society.