Lab News
VISE Seed Grant
Our lab has been awarded with a VISE Seed Grant for our “Diagnosing Pleural Effusions Using a Self-Assembling Needle Robot” project. One of our graduate students, Tayfun Efe Ertop, will be working on this project to do research on our Reconfigurable Parallel Continuum Robot concept, and novel continuum robot sensing methods.
MED Lab Welcomes 6 New Students!
Piper Cannon, Jesse d'Almeida, Daniel Esser, Abby Grillo, Emily McCabe, and Jack Peters joined the MED Lab this summer. They are all pursuing a PhD in Mechanical Engineering. We are looking forward to their contributions to the lab!
NIH R21 Awarded for Neuroimaging during Surgery
A new NIH R21 grant was awarded to Dr. Webster along with PI Dr. Audrey Bowden. The work will focus on real-time neuroimaging during surgery with use of our granular jamming cap.
Katy Defends Thesis
Katy Riojas successfully defended her thesis! Her scientific contributions included the development of a minimally-invasive cochlear implant insertion tool, development of a magnetic steering system for atraumatic cochlear implant surgery, and investigatoin of impedance sensing for cochlear implant electrode array localization. Congratulations Dr. Riojas!
Bryn Defends Thesis
Bryn successfully defends his thesis entitled "Enabling Technologies for Image-Guided Interventions with Minimally Invasive Surgical Robots." Congratulations, Dr. Pitt!
MEDLab touch-based registration research featured as cover article in Journal of Endourology
Accuracy of Touch-Based Registration During Robotic Image-Guided Partial Nephrectomy Before and After Tumor Resection in Validated Phantoms (Kavoussi et al.), was featured as the cover article in Journal of Endourology Volume 35, Number 3, published March 2021. The research proposes a touch-based registration system to intraoperatively update a 3D kidney model with subsurface features, making image guidance feasible during robotic partial nephrectomy.
Juyoung Named Best Student Paper Award Finalist at SPIE
MED Lab undergraduate researcher Juyoung Kim is named a Robert F. Wagner Best Student Paper Award Finalist at the 2021 SPIE Medical Imaging conference for her work "Integrating FireFly Fluorescence into Image Guidance for the da Vinci Robot." Congratulations, Juyoung!
Webster in the 2% of Worldwide Scientists
Dr. Webster is among the top 2 percent of 7 million working scientists in the world based on a recent study from Stanford University.
Harpeth Hall Class 2021
Our introductory robotics course was a smashing success this year! Eleven girls at Harpeth Hall, a local high school, learned the basics of robotics and programming using the MED Lab's custom made, open source pen drawing robot platform. The HarpBot, while capable of drawing the image below, was programmed by the girls to beat you in Hangman, the classic chalkboard word guessing game.
MED Lab Welcomes New Student!
Kyle Leleux joined the MEDLab at the start of the new year. He is pursuing a PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Welcome, Kyle! We look forward to all the cool research you will be doing!