Robots at your fingertips
In Montpellier, surgeons and robotics engineers are working together to develop tools to limit surgical trauma: "minimally invasive surgery" that brings together centers of excellence.
It is every surgeon's dream: to operate with minimal physical impact on the patient. Today, this dream is becoming a reality in the form of robots equipped with multiple arms. The most famous of these, called "da Vinci," has three arms. " This interface between the doctor and their patient enables less invasive microsurgery procedures. " explains one of the surgeons who uses this technique at the University Hospital CenterRenaud Garrel, head of the medical teams for oncology and laryngology and professor at the University of Montpellier.
Reducing the impact of interventions
Tiny incisions, or even no incisions at all: this is what the robot makes possible, as it can access internal organs via natural pathways and arteries. " No scarring, less pain and fewer complications, shorter hospital stays—the advantages are numerous, " summarizes Renaud Garrel.
What's more, robotic assistance also offers radically new features. "This electronic interface can integrate various types of information, such as scanner images or navigation instructions: a virtual or augmented reality that provides surgeons with valuable decision-making tools."
Training tomorrow's surgeons
To improve these assistance systems, Renaud Garrel has been working for several years with Philippe Poignet, head of the robotics department at the Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics and Microelectronics (LIRMM) and professor at UM. This collaboration recently took the form of a six-month internship offered to three interns in the ICT and Health Master's program.
These young surgeons are welcomed at LIRMM for experiments conducted on the Raven system, a robot funded by the CNRS and the Region, which offers the advantage of being fully modifiable unlike the da Vinci system. Their mission: " to test the limits of the system in order to imagine improvements and alternatives," explains Philippe Poignet. They bring us their knowledge of surgical procedures, and it's up to us to invent the robotic translation of these procedures... In other words, cutting-edge tools, the design of which must incorporate requirements for total operational safety."
By assessing practitioners' expectations, LIRMM robotics engineers will be able to help design the robots of tomorrow. But they will also help train future surgeons. This collaboration will soon become part of Montpellier's future medical school: the construction project, currently underway, plans to house a LIRMM team within the future medical education training platform.