In March, the Children’s Heart Centre of the Skåne University Hospital (located in Lund) was accepted by the WASP board as a new Core-Team partner of WARA Robotics!
The Children’s Heart Centre is represented by Phan-Kiet Tran, a pediatric heart surgeon that is developing a robotic colleague with the help of artificial intelligence to assist him in the operating room.
About the Children’s heart centre
At the centre, approximately 250 to 300 open heart surgical procedures are performed each year, ranking among the most challenging as they require a good anatomical understanding of the heart defect to plan and execute the corrective procedure. The surgical tasks require collaboration between a lead and an assistant surgeon and a scrub nurse that passes the surgical instruments. To provide better care for the patients and improve the efficiency of knowledge transfer to the next generation of surgeons, they are keen on exploring AI and Robotics solutions for augmenting our workflows.
Contribution to WARA Robotics
Real-life video data of surgical procedures: the centre has a surgical video database of over 3 000 hours, or 540 x 106 instances of the surgical field. This image data is currently being used to train AI models to recognize and estimate the pose of surgical instruments, surgeons’ and nurses’ hands, and the heart anatomy.
Test-bed for AI-robotic surgery on human donor bodies: in 2023, on the premises of SUH, an innovation and test-bed facility of 350 sqr. meters, including a full-sized operating theatre, was completed. This facility has legal requirements in place to handle human donor bodies for research purposes. The pioneering test-bed facility is managed by specialized nurses and autopsy technicians with full-time employment at the Tissue Bank (largest in Scandinavia) next door. An elevated control room with a floor to ceiling panoramic glass window allows researchers to supervise the tests without having to be in close encounter with the deceased human donor.
Expert surgeons and nursing staff: the centre also has four surgeons and four scrub nurses with an average of 20 years in the field of heart surgery. In particular, associate professor and surgeon Kiet Tran is both the chief of surgery and head of the local AI and surgical robotic research group.
expectations on collaboration with WARA
WARA Robotics can help the centre to solve the technical challenges in robotic control and safety issues for both the patient and the surgical staff who are to collaborate with these robots. Deploying robots in a healthcare setting faces similar challenges to robots for SMEs when it comes to improved human-robot interaction for collaborative tasks, robot learning, automated reasoning and perception to handle dynamic environments and failure recovery, which are research topics in the WARA Robotics.
Alignment with ongoing/future research and activities
Three PhD students are currently active within WARA Robotics (5 to start in 2025), with use cases aligned to a lab automation assistant. One student is directly working on a robotic surgical assistant (e.g., a mobile YuMi) tasked with handing over instruments to the surgeon during an open-heart procedure. The remaining two students are working on full-body manipulation problems with strong potential applications to the surgical assistant problem.
