Karl Price,James Dyson Foundation
Angelica Ruszkowski, a mechatronics engineering graduate from the University of Waterloo and a member of the UW team that created a robotic suturing tool for laparoscopic surgery, gives a thumbs-up as the tool is being tested.
TORONTO — One day, if you go in for surgery to have a gall bladder removed, the surgeon may ask a robot to stitch you up.
A prototype of a robotic suturing tool for laparoscopic surgery — surgery that is minimally invasive because it uses a thin tube that is put through an incision — has been created by a team of University of Waterloo students for a research centre at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
The tool is one of 20 inventions from around the world to be shortlisted for the international James Dyson Award.
"We're really thrilled," says Karl Price, who led the UW team that also consisted of Angelica Ruszkowski and Brock Kopp.
The recent graduates developed the tool as a fourth-year mechatronics engineering project for the Centre for Image-Guided Innovation and Therapeutic Intervention, a medical engineering and research centre at the Hospital for Sick Children.
The international award, with a top prize worth $159,000 Cdn, is given to university-level students or recent graduates for "a design that solves a problem."
The final 20 inventions, selected from 650 entries from 18 countries, include an autonomous "digger" machine created in Austria, a 3-D printed prosthetic limb developed in Japan, and a compact printer from Switzerland that sits on top of a stack of paper, moving its way down the pile.
The winners will be announced on Nov. 7, but Price says just getting international recognition by being shortlisted for the award from the James Dyson Foundation is exciting. His is the only Canadian team on the shortlist this year.
The project was launched while Price was doing his co-op work term at the Toronto hospital's research facility, which is developing the KidsArm, a next generation surgical robotic system that will automate minimally invasive surgeries.
Price became interested in the robotic suturing tool part of that project, and invited Kopp and Ruszkowski to work on it with him as a fourth-year engineering project.
There already are robotic surgical tools on the market, the most famous of which is the da Vinci Surgical System for telesurgery. In that system, a robot is guided by a surgeon who is looking at a 3-D image on a console.
"The da Vinci system was a huge step forward when it came out, but the natural progression in the long run is to start to more fully automate some of these processes, to save time and people's lives," Price says.
Suturing, a mundane task that involves a high degree of fine manual dexterity, is perfectly suited to become an automated task, he adds.
Laparoscopic surgery is done through a small hole rather than cutting the patient's abdomen open. To do it, a surgeon must manipulate fine tools at the end of a long stick-like device. "One surgeon described it to me as being almost like operating with chopsticks," Price says.
To suture, the surgeon has to tie very fine knots using this long device, and "it's very complex and difficult to do," he says. Having a robot do it would save valuable time in the operating room and be better for the patient, he adds.
The UW team made the suturing tool — which is like a sewing machine at the end of a long stick — more manoeuvreable and gave it more dexterity. Then they programmed a robot so it could be told what area to suture, and do it automatically.
Price says there were a number of challenges in developing the technology. "There are very fine-scale pieces that you need to make. It's similar to the traditional concept of making a watch where there a lot of tiny gears that you have to fit into a very tiny space."
The finished prototype will be integrated with other robotic tools being developed in the KidsArm project. "The next step is to take our project and combine it with the vision-guided system developed at (the Centre for Image-Guided Innovation and Therapeutic Intervention) and make it more robust so they are confident in it," says Price, who continues to work at the research facility while doing a master's degree research project through the University of Toronto.
Eventually, the automated suturing tool could be commercialized, but medical devices need to go through years of testing and government approvals before that can happen, Price says. But he adds that he and his teammates are interested in eventually starting a medical robotics company of their own.