EL.I.S.A. – Electric Impedance Sensing in Surgical Applications – is the result of a collaboration between Altair Robotics Lab (University of Verona), IIT (Italian Institute of Technology, Genova) and NearLab (Politecnico di Milano) and it has been partially funded by the ARS and the SMARTSurg projects.
The main goal of this research activity is to integrate advance sensing capabilities into surgical robotic tools.
The advance sensing is based on a compact embedded bio-electric impedance measurement device that could be integrated with minimum hardware modification in standard surgical tools.
Thanks to impedance measurements, an autonomous robotic system will be able to recognize the contact with different tissue types and in different conditions (e.g. healthy and pathological areas in the same tissue or organ). This information could be of enormous importance in the correct autonomous execution of complex surgical procedures, when visual data are not providing enough information for the robust detection and reconstruction of actual patient conditions.
EL.I.S.A. project was the finalist of the international competition for academia and industry Surgical Robot Challenge 2018 and received Best Paper award at CRAS2018.
Check out more about the EL.I.S.A. project from ARS project website.
