A few days ago I attended a day of the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics in London. This is an annual conference organised by the Research Centre where I spent five years of my career before moving to Kent – The Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery at Imperial College London. As ever, the event was impeccably well-organised and professional and featured leading speakers from the world of medical robotics, including both clinicians and engineers. As this was the 10th Hamlyn Symposium, and so something of a celebration, Hamlyn Centre alumni had assembled from various corners of the world, and so it was a nice chance to see some old faces.
It was also great to see some British medical robotics industrial activity in the exhibition. Cambridge Consultants has set up a nice demonstration of a surgical system for cataracts. As far as I’m aware this isn’t a clinical system, but something they had created to show off what they could do. They were a bit cagey about who they had actually been developing medical robotics work for, although anyone with an interest in the field can probably take a good guess.
Some robotic endomicroscopy work was on display again at the Surgical Robotics Challenge held as part of the Symposium. Last year we won best video (and had a follow-up paper), this year the endomicroscopy team sadly didn’t grab a prize but still helped to spread the word. You can see examples in this youtube video, skip to 3.25 to see the robotic endomicroscopy system in action, and some comments from Khushi Vyas, a student at Imperial who I work with.