When it comes to surgical bone cutting, the state-of-the-art in modern medicine is pretty much the same as it was back in the 19th century: mechanical friction. But the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Basel, together with its spin-off company AOT and the flagship project MIRACLE, are working on a more elegant approach: lasers! Come learn more at this year’s edition of Basel Night.

Using lasers instead of mechanical tools to ablate bones enables surgeons to perform bone cuts with improved healing characteristics. Furthermore, the robot-guided laser ablation allows for new three-dimensional cuts of almost any desired shape enabling completely new surgical techniques. These achievements simplify procedures and shorten the time required to plan and carry through a surgical intervention.

The evening will feature additional presentations and a panel discussion focused on the intersection of robotics with health care and medicine, in which you’ll also learn about Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Advanced Multimodality Image Guided Operating (AMIGO) Suite, and other projects to be announced soon.

Event Agenda

6:00 pm Doors Open

6:20 pm Welcome Remarks

6:30 pm Presentation by Philippe Cattin: Re-Inventing Bone Surgery

7:00 pm Presentation by Jayender Jagadeesan: the AMIGO Suite

7:10 pm Presentation by Sheila Russo: Robotic approaches to enhance laser surgery

7:20 pm Panel Discussion, followed by Networking Reception and Augmented Reality Demo

9:00 pm Doors Close

Keynote Speaker

Philippe Cattin was born in Switzerland in 1967. He received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Applied Science in Brugg/Windisch in 1991. In 1995 he received the M.Sc. degree*in *computer science and in 2003 the Ph.D. degree in robotics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. From 2003 to 2007 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Computer Vision Laboratory at ETH Zurich. In 2007 he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Basel and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2015.

Philippe Cattin is the founder of the Medical Image Analysis Center at the Medical Faculty of the University of Basel. He is currently the head of the recently founded Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Basel. His research interests include medical image analysis, image-guided therapy and robotics-guided laser osteotomy. As a Principal Investigator he has finished many projects in these areas and published over 100 papers, patents and book chapter.

Speakers/Panelists

Dr. Jayender Jagadeesan is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, Research Associate at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Prior to his current appointment, he completed his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario, Canada and his Bachelors of Technology (B.Tech.) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. His research interests include image-guided therapy, surgical navigation, robotics, modeling and control of smart materials, and haptics. Minimally Invasive Surgical devices and applications form the primary research motivation.

Sheila Russo is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Microrobotics Lab and Biodesign Lab at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She completed her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the BioRobotics Institute, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy. Her research interests include surgical robotics, laser assisted minimally invasive surgery, soft robotics, sensing and actuation, and advanced manufacturing.

More panelists will be announced soon.

Moderator

Frank Preiswerk is a postdoctoral fellow in radiology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. His research is focused on combining multimodal imaging techniques with machine learning methods in the context of image-guided therapy. He obtained his BS and MS in computer science and his PhD in biomedical engineering from the University of Basel, Switzerland. Frank is currently also chapter head of the Friends of Basel in New England.