Many surgeries today are performed as open, invasive procedures because surgeons lack the right tools. Our goal is to create the technology that will enable converting these open procedures to minimally invasive ones.

– Dr. Pierre Dupont, Chief of Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering at Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School.

In 2010, with the goal of facilitating technological solutions to healthcare problems, Dr. Pierre Dupont made the bold move of embedding an engineering laboratory inside the Boston Children’s Hospital – a leading teaching hospital in the area of Cardiac Surgery. Dr. Dupont’s laboratory is “a mixing pot” of researchers from engineering and the medical sciences who teach and learn from each other.

In this webinar, Dr. Pierre Dupont talks about the challenges and opportunities of developing image-guided robotic medical devices in an academic research environment. His talk covers his recent work on concentric tube robots, which are designed to balance the objectives of force application and steerability, and can navigate through the body along complex 3D curves and manipulate tools at their tips, such as grippers, staplers, cutting tools and lasers. He also discusses robotic application to beating-heart intracardiac surgery and describes his current research in small tetherless robots that are powered, imaged and controlled by an MRI scanner.