AcuSurgical – ready, set, go!

credits: AcuSurgical official website

AcuSurgical, a startup developing a robotic assistant for vitreo-retinal surgery, announces a Series A funding of around 6€ million euros. The round was led by institutional investors Merieux Partners and Supernova Invest, with participations from IRDI-Soridec and Sofimac Innovation. The round aims to finance upcoming clinical trials and CE mark certification.

AcuSurgical designs and builds a robotic surgical assistant dedicated to the treatment of retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) affecting over 300 million patients worldwide including one in three Europeans aged over 70. AcuSurgical’s mission is to improve the precision and safety of current retinal procedures, augmenting the surgeons abilities and thus enabling new retinal surgeries. The aim is to treat the significative percentage of patients who today suffer from limited treatment options.

The innovative and unique robot was designed in collaboration with the LIRMM robotics laboratory, a joint research unit of the University of Montpellier and the CNRS (France) and vitreo-retinal surgeons at the Jean Monnet University in Saint-Etienne (France). The company recently signed a partnership with the Adolphe de Rothschild Foundation based in Paris.

“Our ambition is to enable innovative treatments for retinal disease that will open new perspectives for the numerous patients who today are impacted by these debilitating retinal conditions and who currently have limited options for treatment. We’re proud of the confidence afforded to us by this strong group of investors. Their support will allow us to grow the team and reach key milestones towards certification and commercialisation of our innovative surgical robotics platform” says Christoph Spuhler, CEO and co-founder of AcuSurgical.

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AcuSurgical was co-founded in 2020 by Christoph Spuhler, robotics professors Philippe Poignet and Yassine Haddab and vitreo-retinal surgeons and professors Philippe Gain and Gilles Thuret. The team is comprised of experts with significant previous experience in surgical robotics and ophthalmic medical devices. The company grew out of a collaboration between the co-founders and the LIRMM robotics laboratory accompanied by seed funding from the AxLR incubator. SATT AxLR specializes in the maturation and commercialization of innovative projects resulting from academic research. The company has been incubated at the BIC since 2018, and has received i-site MUSE support.

9th Summer School on Surgical Robotics

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.

Rise of the Medical Machines

source: this website

Pier Cristoforo Giulianotti (University of Illinois – Department of Surgery) cannot foresee a time when robots replace surgeons, but he has no doubts over the importance of robotics: robot surgery is the future of medicine.

After some historical hints, a brief presentation of “five of the coolest robots in medicine” is proposed: Da Vinci System, Cyberknife, Neuroarm, Rp-Vita and Paro.

Click on the image on the right, here, to be redirected to the official webpage and read the whole story 🙂

                                              

…is there a future… for human doctors? maybe in science fiction…

SURGICAL ROBOTICS – 6th Summer School

September 4-11, 2013 – MONTPELLIER, France

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 his fatigue and to restrict his exposition to radiation. For the patient, robotics surgery may result in less 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 orthopedics, as well as providing innovative new ones 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, orthopedics 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.

This course is 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.

Coordinated by:

• Philippe POIGNET & Nabil ZEMITI – LIRMM, CNRS – Université Montpellier 2
• Renaud GARREL – Université Montpellier 1, CHRU Montpellier, ENT Dpt

MORE INFO ON THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE

10k & Guestbook

Hi everybody! People seem to appreciate my blog, that tonight achieved the goal of ten thousand views! That was unexpected in slightly more than one year of regular activity 🙂

So, first of all, thank you very much!

I would appreciate receiving your comments and feedbacks about my blog! Feel free to let me know your opinions about what I’ve published. If there is something in particular you would like me to write a post about, feel free to leave your comment on the new Guestbook (or just click on the image, or access it from the horizontal navigation bar over here) 🙂