Developing neuroArm required an international collaboration of health professionals, physicists, electrical, software, optical and mechanical engineers to build a robot capable of operating safely in a surgical suite and within the strong magnetic field of the intraoperative MRI environment.
"Building a robot is complex to begin with. Adding the constraints of operating in a sterile operating room, within an MRI machine and alongside the other people involved in surgery makes it a very complex environment," says the project's robotics engineer Alex Greer. By acquiring first-hand knowledge of the demands in the operating room, Greer and Paul McBeth, the first U of C neuroArm robotics engineer, acted as the bridge between the physicians, scientists and engineers involved in the project.
"Doctors and engineers are good at what they do but they speak different languages," Greer says. "Translating surgical requirements into technical terms can be a challenge." When the project began, engineers from MDA traveled to Calgary and worked with surgeons for several weeks to define the requirements necessary for the successful design of neuroArm.
Sutherland's team is developing specialized training programs in partnership with the Calgary Health Region, and U of C's faculties of medicine and education to train surgeons in the use of neuroArm. Many other surgical disciplines have and continue to participate in applying neuroArm to various types of surgical procedures.
"We're not just building a robot, we're building a medical robotics program," Dr. Sutherland says. "We want the neuroArm technology to be translated into the global community, i.e. hospitals around
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Contact: Grady Semmens
gsemmens@ucalgary.ca
403-220-7722
University of Calgary
17-Apr-2007