Surgeons and engineers attend the eighth Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics.

On Sunday 21^st and Monday 22^nd June, over 250 surgeons and engineers from across the globe assembled at the Royal Geographical Society for the eighth Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics. 

This interactive annual event offers delegates the opportunity to listen to talks, attend various workshops and to take part in demos and simulations of the various medical robots being developed today.  It was hosted by Imperial’s Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, one of the Institute of Global Health Innovation’s (IGHI) centres of excellence.

The theme for this year’s symposium was ‘From whole body systems to micro instruments’ and included a speaker line-up of leading scientists and engineers in collaborative robotics, navigation and image guidance.

The keynote lecture was delivered by Sylvain Martel of École Polytechnique de Montréal in Canada, who discussed the harnessing of bacteria to create cancer fighting nanorobots.  Other speakers included Andreas Melzer from the University of Dundee, who discussed MR image guided robotic assisted interventions and focused ultrasound, whilst Garnette Sutherland of the University of Calgary in Canada offered his insights into image-guided robotic neurosurgery.  Nassir Navab from TUM in Germany and Johns Hopkins University in the USA talked about robotics and control for patient and process specific imaging and visualisation. 

The Karl Storz - Harold Hopkins Lecture was presented by Dr Alexandre Mottrie of the OLV Clinic who talked about the 'Belgium Future & New Developments in Robotic Surgery'. 

Guests also had the opportunity to attend workshop programmes on the days pre- and pro-ceding the Symposium. Topics covered included smart surgical devices, bioinspired and flexible access surgery, micro-robotics and wearable and assistive robots, among others. 

Unique to this year’s symposium was the launch of the Surgical Robot Challenge which offered applicants the chance to pitch their new surgical robot idea to a panel of experts.  Congratulations are in order for Kyle Eastwood, Vivek Bodani, Karl Price, Kunj Upadhyaya, Dale Podolsky, Hamidreza Azimian, Thomas Looi and James Drake from the Center for Image-Guided Innovation and Therapeutic Intervention at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, who was the overall winner of the challenge with their idea for a concentric tube tool for the daVinci research kit.  The full list of winners in the sub-categories of the challenge can be found here.  

Co-Director of the Hamlyn Centre, Professor Guang-Zhong Yang said “the Hamlyn Symposium provided an excellent platform to showcase the cutting-edge developments in robotic surgery that can help boost its usage and in turn, reshape the future of healthcare worldwide.  We were also delighted to host the very first of our Surgical Robot Challenges, a key opportunity to bring new ideas in robotics to the forefront and spark possible new collaborations”

View a selection of photos from the event below.  All of the photos can be found on our Flickr pages here.