The registration for the 9th Summer School on Surgical Robotics (SSSR-2019) is now open (registration deadline: July 26th, 2019).
The School will be held in Montpellier, France, from 23th to 28th September 2019, and is open to Master students, PhD students, Post-docs and participants from industry.
All information can be found on the official website: http://www.lirmm.fr/sssr-2019/
Robotics enables surgery to be less invasive and/or to enhance the performance of the surgeon. In minimally invasive surgery (MIS) for instance, robotics can improve the dexterity of conventional instruments, which is restricted by the insertion ports, by adding intra-cavity degrees of freedom. It can also provide the surgeon with augmented visual and haptic inputs. In open surgery, robotics makes it possible to use in real time pre-operative and per-operative image data to improve precision and reproducibility when cutting, drilling, milling bones, to locate accurately and remove tumours. In both cases, as in other surgical specialities, robotics allows the surgeon to perform more precise, reproducible and dextrous motion. It is also a promising solution to minimize fatigue and to restrict exposition to radiation. For the patient, robotics surgery may result in lower risk, pain and discomfort, as well as a shorter recovery time. These benefits explain the increasing research efforts made all over the world since the early 90’s.
Surgical robotics requires great skills in many engineering fields as the integration of robots in the operating room is technically difficult. It induces new problems such as safety, man-machine cooperation, real time sensing and processing, mechanical design, force and vision-based control. However, it is very promising as a mean to improve conventional surgical procedures, for example in neurosurgery and orthopaedics, as well as to provide innovation in micro-surgery, image-guided therapy, MIS and Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES).
The highly interdisciplinary nature of surgical robotics requires close cooperation between medical staff and researchers in mechanics, computer sciences, control and electrical engineering. This cooperation has resulted in many prototypes for a wide variety of surgical procedures. A few robotics systems are yet available on a commercial basis and have entered the operating room namely in neurosurgery, orthopaedics and MIS.
Depending on the application, surgical robotics gets more or less deeply into the following fields:
- multi-modal information processing;
- modelling of rigid and deformable anatomical parts;
- pre-surgical planning and simulation of robotic surgery;
- design and control of guiding systems for assistance of the surgeon gesture.
During the Summer school, these fields will be addressed by surgeons and researchers working in leading hospitals and labs. They will be completed by engineers who will give insight into practical integration problems. The courses are addressed to PhD students, post-docs and researchers already involved in the area or interested by the new challenges of such an emerging area interconnecting technology and surgery. Basic background in mechanical, computer science, control and electrical engineering is recommended.
We will also have student presentations, outdoors activities (canoe, hiking in the Garrigue…), “aperitifs”, visit of 
andreacollo 