UVA professor working to innovate robotic surgery

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - An engineering professor with the University of Virginia is working to program safety tools into robotic surgery.

“We are trying to augment surgical robots with capabilities to monitor what is happening during a procedure,” Prof. Homa Alemzadeh said.

Alemzadeh is receiving a total of $550,000 over five years from a grant to help innovate robotic-assisted surgeries.

“It’s a technology to enable minimally-invasive surgery to make surgery safer, or enable some kinds of procedures that are hard to do manually by the surgeons,” the professor said. “Just making it easier to manipulate various small areas or tissues inside a patient body. Things that are not possible by hands, like in laparoscopic surgery.”

Alemzadeh hopes this work will help residents or surgical trainees to safely get a better sense of what might go wrong, or prevent some adverse events from happening.

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