Fantastic Voyage: from science fiction to reality

Under the direction of Professor Sylvain Martel, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Micro/Nanosystem Development, Construction and Validation, and in collaboration with researchers at the Centre hospitalier de l'Universit� de Montr�al (CHUM), the Polytechnique team has succeeded in injecting, propelling and controlling by means of software programs an initial prototype of an untethered device (a ferromagnetic 1.5- millimetre-diameter sphere) within the carotid artery of a living animal placed inside a clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system.

Encouraged by these results, staff at the Polytechnique NanoRobotics Laboratory are currently working to further reduce the size of the devices so that, within a few years, they can navigate inside smaller blood vessels.

Original Article

Search engine spawned from antiterrorism efforts finds place in business

[...]

 

The strength of the system, added Fetch Chairman and CTO Steve Minton, emanates from the machine learning focus of the search engine's agent-based tools. The system can recognize types of data based on a pattern and can apply what is learned about that pattern to future searches, Minton said.

 

In addition, the tool can mimic human behavior by automatically filling out a form without human intervention, using data from search results, according to Minton, a member of the original development team at the University of Southern California.

 

Original Article

Technology Review's 10 Emerging Technologies of 2007

Technology Review has their 10 Emerging technologies of 2007 series of articles up.  Go take a look at http://www.technologyreview.com/special/emerging/

 

My personal faves are Augmented Reality, Nanohealing, and Personalized Medical Monitors.

Robot that roams the body to seek and destroy cancer

The idea of a beetle moving around inside your body may be the stuff of horror films. But scientists believe an insect-shaped robot could be a major weapon in the fight against cancer.

 

The device, just under an inch long, is designed to be inserted into the body through a small incision.

 

Once inside, doctors can control its movements and direct it to areas where investigations are needed.

 

[...]

 

However, unlike the plot of the 1966 Raquel Welch film Fantastic Voyage - which featured a microscopic crew and submarine travelling through a scientist's bloodstream - this device could not be inserted into blood vessels because it is too big.

 

I don't think devices that can do precisely that will be long in coming, and they won't need cables connecting them to the outside world either.

Nano tech in batteries

A123 Systems is delivering a new generation of batteries that deliver up to 10 times longer cycle life, five times more power and dramatically faster charge times over conventional high-power battery technology.

Connecting Your Brain to the Game

Emotiv Systems, an electronic-game company from San Francisco, wants people to play with the power of the mind. Starting tomorrow, video-game makers will be able to buy Emotiv's electro-encephalograph (EEG) caps and software developer's tool kits so that they can build games that use the electrical signals from a player's brain to control the on-screen action.

 

Emotiv's system has three different applications. One is designed to sense facial expressions such as winks, grimaces, and smiles and transfer them, in real time, to an avatar. This could be useful in virtual-world games, such as Second Life, in which it takes a fair amount of training to learn how to express emotions and actions through a keyboard. Another application detects two emotional states, such as excitement and calm. Emotiv's chief product officer, Randy Breen, says that these unconscious cues could be used to modify a game's soundtrack or to affect the way that virtual characters interact with a player. The third set of software can detect a handful of conscious intentions that can be used to push, pull, rotate, and lift objects in a virtual world.

 

Original Article

Artificial Retina

Patients who have gone blind are a step closer to perhaps one day regaining some of their sight.

Researchers at the USC Doheny Eye Institute announced today the next step in their efforts to advance technology that hopefully will help patients with retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration regain some vision using an implanted artificial retina.

The announcement by Mark Humayun, professor of ophthalmology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and associate director of research at the Doheny Retina Institute, came at a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

From Science Daily

Article from USC

Research integrates photonic circuitry on a silicon chip

In work that could lead to completely new devices, systems and applications in computing and telecommunications, MIT researchers are bringing the long-sought goal of "optics on a chip" one step closer to market.

 

In the January 2007 inaugural issue of the journal Nature Photonics, the team reports a novel way to integrate photonic circuitry on a silicon chip. Adding the power and speed of light waves to traditional electronics could achieve system performance inconceivable by electronic means alone.

 

The MIT invention will enable such integrated devices to be mass-manufactured for the first time. And, depending on the growth of the telecom industry, the new devices could be in demand within five years, said co-author Erich P. Ippen, the Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics.

 

The new technology will also enable supercomputers on a chip with unique high-speed capabilities for signal processing, spectroscopy and remote testing, among other fields.

 

Original Article

New analog circuits could impact consumer electronics

Advances in digital electronic circuits have prompted the boost in functions and ever- smaller size of such popular consumer goods as digital cameras, MP3 players and digital televisions. But the same cannot be said of the older analog circuits in the same devices, which process natural sights and sounds in the real world. Because analog circuits haven't enjoyed a similar rate of progress, they are draining power and causing other bottlenecks in improved consumer electronic devices.

 

Now MIT engineers have devised new analog circuits they hope will change that. Their work was discussed at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco Feb. 11-15.

 

"During the past several decades engineers have focused on allowing signals to be processed and stored in digital forms," said Hae-Seung Lee, a professor in MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). "But most real-world signals are analog signals, so analog circuits are an essential part of most electronic systems."

 

Analog circuits are used to amplify, process and filter analog signals and convert them to digital signals, or vice versa, so the real world and electronic devices can talk to each other. Analog signals are continuous and they vary in size, whereas digital signals have specific or discrete values.

 

Original Article

MIT-led panel backs 'heat mining' as key U.S. energy source

A comprehensive new MIT-led study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth's hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact.

An 18-member panel led by MIT prepared the 400-plus page study, titled "The Future of Geothermal Energy" (PDF, 14.1 MB). Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, it is the first study in some 30 years to take a new look at geothermal, an energy resource that has been largely ignored.

The goal of the study was to assess the feasibility, potential environmental impacts and economic viability of using enhanced geothermal system (EGS) technology to greatly increase the fraction of the U.S. geothermal resource that could be recovered commercially.

Although geothermal energy is produced commercially today and the United States is the world's biggest producer, existing U.S. plants have focused on the high-grade geothermal systems primarily located in isolated regions of the west. This new study takes a more ambitious look at this resource and evaluates its potential for much larger-scale deployment.

Original Article

U.S. university to build 'soft-bodied' robots

Forget the humanoid Asimo and Roomba, the roaming vacuum. The next generation of robots will be soft-bodied, providing more flexibility than their stiff-jointed cousins, according to researchers at Tufts University.
The Medford, Mass. university launched the new initiative focused on the science and engineering of a new class of soft-bodied robots with the announcement of $730,000 in funding from the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles, Calif.
The new field will combine biology, bio-engineering and nanotechnology to create a flexible breed of robots capable of performing tasks requiring greater mobility, such as search and rescue missions or repair and maintenance during space exploration missions.
"Our overall goal is to develop systems and devices — soft-bodied robots — based on biological materials and on the adaptive mechanisms found in living cells, tissues and whole organisms," said co-director David Kaplan, a professor of biomedical engineering.
While Honda's Asimo robot is meant to resemble a humanoid, it is made mostly of stiff materials incapable of the kinds of flexible actions common in biology, said Kaplan's co-director, biology Prof. Barry Trimmer.
It is Trimmer's work in studying caterpillars that first provided insights into how to build a soft-bodied robot. The caterpillar is unique in that its fluid and flexible movements are controlled with a simple brain and without the use of joints. Kaplan's work has focused on engineering strong yet flexible fibres.
The two hope the new class of robots will be continuously deformable and capable of collapsing into small volumes. Their work will focus on control systems, bionic materials, robot design and construction, and the development of operating systems to run the robots.
Roboticists have long tried to emulate animal motions such as walking, but only recently has the idea of softer materials begun to play a role in robot design.
In 2005 researchers at the University of California Berkeley began work on a robot modelled after the octopus, which is capable of walking underwater on two of its arms despite having no joints in its limbs.

Original Article

The Terminator cometh

At 3 feet tall and a whopping 200 pounds, it wouldn't pass a physical, but it fires a machine gun with half-mile accuracy and doesn't flinch.

The latest infantryman is electronic -- a gun-toting robot developed at Picatinny Arsenal.

Engineers at the Army weapons research post in Rockaway Township hope to send the machine, the first of its kind, into combat this year.

They envision the robot rolling through city streets in search of the enemy, while troops operate it from a half-mile away.

Unlike its human counterparts, it doesn't run out of breath, and it can hit a pie plate from about 900 yards. A soldier might need to be about 600 yards closer to boast the same level of accuracy.

It goes "places you don't want to send a soldier," said Rudy Roehrich, a Picatinny engineer who helped design and test the machine.

Picatinny has been working on the $3.2 million program for several years, wrestling with how to ensure the robo-soldier fires only when it's commanded.

It's also taken some time to convince Army brass of the remote-controlled machine's potential.

"The Army is not used to machines doing their work," Roehrich said. "When you put a gun on it, they say, 'What's a soldier going to do? I don't trust that too much.' It's a culture change."

One of the biggest tests has been ensuring the robot does only what it's told. Troops operate the machine from a suitcase-size computer that lets them peer through the robot's five cameras and drive it by tilting a joystick.

Soldiers must stay in constant communication with the robot and give it a series of computerized commands before the M249 machine gun fires.

"It can't arm and fire if everything is not exactly right," Roehrich said. The robot soldier also is said not to be invincible, although Picatinny engineers would not specify exactly how it could be destroyed in combat.

Arsenal engineers see the $250,000 robot -- known as Special Weapons Observation Remote Reconnaissance Direct-Action System, or SWORDS -- as a way to keep troops out of harm's way.

It also may be a harbinger of things to come.

The idea for the gun-toting robot developed about three years ago when troops in Afghanistan asked for a device that could crawl through caves.

Picatinny engineers attached several weapons to the TALON robot, which the military has used for several years to disarm roadside bombs and mines. But it was the machine-gun version that troops found most helpful because of its ability to fire fast and far.

Contractor Foster-Miller in Massachusetts is making 10, and 83 more are planned to be built.

The Army is still reviewing the robot, but engineers hope to get it to U.S. units this year and, after training, to Iraq, said Picatinny project officer Kim Jones.

So far, a SWORDS prototype has been a hit, said retired Sgt. 1st Class Dave Platt, who runs robot training sessions at Fort Benning, Ga.

While some older troops are hesitant about using it and can be "set in their ways," the younger ones are excited to learn how it works, Platt said.

"They'd rather use this than stand in 130-degree heat with 100 pounds of armor and ammunition," said Platt, who works for the U.S. Special Operations Command in Florida.

Robo-builder

Engineers are racing to unveil the world’s first robot capable of building a house at the touch of a button.

The first prototype — a watertight shell of a two-storey house built in 24 hours without a single builder on site — will be erected in California before April.

A rival design, being pioneered in the East Midlands, with £1.2m of government funding, will include sunken baths, fireplaces and cornices. There are even plans for robots to supplant painters and decorators by spraying colourful frescoes at an affordable price.

By building almost an entire house from just two materials — concrete and gypsum — the robots will eliminate the need for dozens of traditional components, including floorboards, wooden window frames and possibly even wallpaper. It may eventually be possible to use specially treated gypsum instead of glass window panes.

Engineers on both projects say the robots will not only cut costs and avoid human delays but liberate the normal family homes from the conventional designs of pitched roofs, right-angled walls and rectangular windows.

“The architectural options will explode,” predicted Dr Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who will soon unleash his $1.5m (£940,000) robot. “We will be able to build curves and domes as easily as straight walls.

“Your shoes, clothes and car are already made automatically, but your house is built by hand and it doesn’t make sense.”

At Loughborough University’s School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, the technology is being backed by a £1.2m grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

It involves computer-controlled robotic nozzles which pipe quick-drying liquid gypsum and concrete to form walls, floors and roofs.

Inspired by the inkjet printer, the technology goes far beyond the techniques already used for prefabricated homes. “This will remove all the limitations of traditional building,” said Hugh Whitehead of the architecture firm Foster & Partners, which designed the “Gherkin” skyscraper in London and is producing designs for the Loughborough team. “Anything you can dream you can build.”

The robots are rigged to a metal frame, enabling them to shuttle in three dimensions and assemble the structure of the house layer by layer. The sole foreman on site operates a computer programmed with the designer’s plans.

The researchers in Los Angeles claim their robot will be able to build the shell of a house in 24 hours. “Compared to a conventional house, the speed of construction will be increased 200-fold and the building costs will be reduced to a fifth of what they are today,” said Khoshnevis.

The rival British system is likely to take at least a week but will include more sophisticated design features, with the computer’s nozzle weaving in ducts for water pipes, electrical wiring and ventilation within the panels of gypsum or concrete.

Jala El-Ali, structural designer at Buro Happold — the firm that helped design Arsenal’s new football stadium, which is shaped like a flying saucer — said future homes could carry features borrowed from ant hills, honeycombs or sea shells.

Dr Rupert Soar, in charge of the project at Loughborough, has travelled to Namibia to seek inspiration from termites, which construct giant mounds by regurgitating earth in intricate designs.

“If you ask a bricklayer to lay bricks in anything other than a straight line, you’ll run into problems,” said Soar. “But if you ask the robot to make a squiggly line it really doesn’t care.”

The robots will also create a smaller “carbon footprint” than conventional building methods; and, theoretically, a family could grind down a spare room when the children leave home.

Original Article

However, the robot appears to be afflicted by all-too-human obstacles. While the Americans’ first robot-built home is predicting a completion date of April, the Loughborough prototype is unlikely to be built for at least five years.

A Better Artificial Skin

A patient's skin cells, genetically modified and grown in a test tube, could provide the next generation of artificial skin. As a first step in creating such replacement skin, scientists in Cincinnati have engineered bacteria-resistant skin cells in the lab and are now testing them in animals. Ultimately, they hope to produce a type of artificial skin that can sweat, tan, and fight off infection.

"We're using genetic modification to try to get the cultured skin to behave more like normal skin," says Dorothy Supp, a researcher at the Cincinnati Shriners Hospital for Children who led the project.

Original Article

Researchers Use Wikipedia To Make Computers Smarter

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have found a way to give computers encyclopedic knowledge of the world to help them “think smarter,” making common sense and broad-based connections between topics just as the human mind does.

The new method will help computers filter e-mail spam, perform Web searches and even conduct electronic intelligence gathering at a much more sophisticated level than current programs, according to researchers Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Shaul Markovitch of the Technion Faculty of Computer Science. The findings will be presented next week in Hyderabad, India during the Twentieth International Joint Conference for Artificial Intelligence.

The program devised by the Technion researchers helps computers map single words and larger fragments of text to a database of concepts built from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which has over one million articles in its English-language version. The Wikipedia-based concepts act as “background knowledge” to help computers figure out the meaning of the text entered into a Web search, for instance.

Giving computers this deeper knowledge has been a long-standing problem in artificial intelligence, according to Markovitch. “Humans use a significant amount of background knowledge” to understand text, “but we didn’t know how to have computers access such knowledge,” he said.

Most Web search and e-mail filter programs appear smart by calculating how often certain words appear in two texts, Markovitch explained. “But what is common to all these applications is that the programs that actually do this kind of thing don’t understand text. They treat text as a collection of words, but they don’t understand the meaning of words.”

This shallow understanding is what makes an e-mail spam filter block all messages containing the word “vitamin,” but fail to block messages containing the word “B12.” “If the program never saw “B12” before, it’s just a word without any meaning. But you would know it’s a vitamin,” Markovitch said.

“With our methodology, however, the computer will use its Wikipedia-based knowledge base to infer that "B12" is strongly associated with the concept of vitamins, and will correctly identify the message as spam," he added.

Or, computers could look at a chunk of text about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction and know that it is conceptually related to topics such as the Iraq war and U.S. Senate debates on intelligence—even if those terms do not appear anywhere in the original text.

The method also helps computers figure out ambiguous terms—deciding, for instance, whether the word “mouse” refers to the computer device or the fuzzy animal. This can be especially important in translated documents, Markovitch said.

In the near future, the Technion researchers hope to improve their method by adding information from the Web page links inside Wikipedia articles. They are already pursuing a patent on their work, which they say will be of interest to the intelligence community and Web search engine companies, among others.

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is Israel's leading science and technology university. Home to the country’s winners of the Nobel Prize in science, it commands a worldwide reputation for its pioneering work in nanotechnology, computer science, biotechnology, water-resource management, materials engineering, aerospace and medicine. The majority of the founders and managers of Israel's high-tech companies are alumni. Based in New York City, the American Technion Society is the leading American organization supporting higher education in Israel, with 17 offices around the country.

January 4, 2007
Contact: Kevin Hattori (212) 407-6319
 
Original Article

An ATM for books

By Emily Maltby, FSB Magazine
December 14 2006: 9:36 AM EST

(FSB Magazine) -- Buying a book could become as easy as buying a pack of gum. After several years in development, the Espresso - a $50,000 vending machine with a conceivably infinite library - is nearly consumer-ready and will debut in ten to 25 libraries and bookstores in 2007. The New York Public Library is scheduled to receive its machine in February.

The company behind the Espresso is called On Demand Books, founded by legendary book editor Jason Epstein, 78, and Dane Neller, 56, but the technology was developed six years ago by Jeff Marsh, who is a technology advisor for New York City-based ODB (ondemandbooks.com).

The machine can print, align, mill, glue and bind two books simultaneously in less than seven minutes, including full-color laminated covers. It prints in any language and will even accommodate right-to-left texts by putting the spine on the right. The upper page limit is 550 pages, though by tweaking the page thickness and type size, you could get a copy of War and Peace (albeit tough to read) if you wanted.

Neller says that future versions of the machine will accommodate longer works with fewer hassles. Prices for the finished product will vary depending on locations, but the production cost is about a penny per page. (At right, FSB's interpretation.)

Some 2.5 million books are now available - about one million in English and no longer under copyright protection. On Demand accesses the volumes through Google and the Open Content Alliance, among other sources. Neller predicts that within about five years On Demand Books will be able to reproduce every volume ever printed.

Epstein says that the larger obstacles are consumer preference - the machine can't make you a latte - and convincing skeptics in the industry. But some early adopters are already sold on the idea.

Niko Pfund, a publisher at Oxford University Press, says the evolution away from traditional bookstores is only natural. "For hundreds of years the industry was unchanged," Pfund says. "Then audio came out. Now it's time for digital."

New Research Could Lead to "Invisible" Electronics

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Imagine a car windshield that displays a map to your destination, military goggles with targets and instructions displayed right before a soldier's eyes or a billboard that doubles as a window.

Only in science fiction you say? Northwestern University researchers report that by combining organic and inorganic materials they have produced transparent, high-performance transistors that can be assembled inexpensively on both glass and plastics.

The results of this breakthrough, which brings such futuristic high-quality displays closer to reality, were published in the November 2006 issue of the journal Nature Materials.

Researchers have long worked on developing new types of displays powered by electronics without visible wires. But, until now, no one was able to develop materials for transistors that could be “invisible” while still maintaining a high level of performance.

“Our development provides new strategies for creating transparent electronics,” said Tobin J. Marks, the Vladimir N. Ipatieff Research Professor in Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern and professor of materials science and engineering, who led the research. “You can imagine a variety of applications for new electronics that haven't been possible previously -- imagine displays of text or images that would seem to be floating in space.”

Transistors are used for all the switching and computing necessary in electronics, and, in displays, they are used to power and switch the light sources.

High-performance, transparent transistors could be combined with existing kinds of light display technologies, such as organic light-emitting diodes, liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and electroluminescent displays, which are already used in televisions, desktop and laptop computers and cell phones.

To create their thin-film transistors, Marks' group combined films of the inorganic semiconductor indium oxide with a multilayer of self-assembling organic molecules that provides superior insulating properties.

The indium oxide films can be fabricated at room temperature, allowing the transistors to be produced at a low cost. And, in addition to being transparent, the transistors outperform the silicon transistors currently used in LCD screens and perform nearly as well as high-end polysilicon transistors.

Prototype displays using the transistors developed at Northwestern could be available in 12 to 18 months, said Marks. He has formed a start-up company, Polyera, to bring this and related technologies to market.

Robotic hand has a built-in 'slip sense'

An artificial hand built in the UK has fingertip sensors that let it grasp delicate objects without crushing or dropping them.

A previous prototype has proved itself capable of grappling with door keys and twisting the lid off a jar (see New robot hand is even more human). The latest incarnation not only moves more like a real hand but also has improved sense of touch (990KB, Windows Media Player format).

"We've added new arrays of sensors that allow it to sense temperature, grip-force and whether an object is slipping," says Neil White, an electronic engineer at Southampton University who developed the hand with colleagues Paul Chappell, Andy Cranny and Darryl Cotton.

Its developers hope that the robotic hand could eventually give amputees greater dexterity and deftness of touch via a prosthetic limb. Like some existing mechanical prosthetics, it could be controlled by connecting its motors to nerves in an amputee's arm, shoulder or chest.
Slip sense

Pressure sensors in each fingertip connect to a control system that maintains the hand's grip. "If a hand without them held a polystyrene cup it would just crush it," White explains. By contrast, the new hand uses feedback from its sensors to prevent each finger from closing further, once an object is gripped.

Gripping an object too lightly can be a problem with existing artificial hands. "The slip sensors prevent that by detecting the vibration as an object slips through the fingers," says White.

Other slip-detectors use microphones to pick up the sound caused when an object starts slipping, he explains: "Using vibration is more robust because there can be no interference in noisy environments. Some hands that use sound will close just when you whistle at them."

The hand's sensors consist of patches of piezoelectric crystals surrounded by circuitry, all screen printed directly onto the each fingertip through a technique called "thick-film fabrication". The piezoelectric crystals create voltages when their shape changes, and can detect changes in temperature, vibration and strain.
Touchy-feely

Thick-film fabrication is cheaper than using conventional silicon, says White. This could be important for prosthetic devices, he adds, as they will only be manufactured in small numbers, preventing the development on an economy of scale.

Giving prosthetic hands the ability to "feel" objects is important, says Göran Lundborg at Lund University in Sweden. "If people are to use them in place of real hands they need to have similar abilities," he told New Scientist.

Lundborg adds that the ultimate goal is to find a way to let a person's brain control the feedback loop between an artificial hand's sensors and motors. In future, this might be achieved by connecting the sensor output directly to a patient's brain or nerves, he suggests.

But, in the meantime, there may be simpler ways to do it. "We have experimented with feeding the output from small microphones in a glove into earphones," Lundborg says.

With training, subjects involved in the experiment were able to distinguish between the sounds produced by grasping different types of objects with the glove. MRI scans also revealed that they processed information from the earphones using the area of the brain that normally deals with touch.

Original Article

Handheld device sees more colours than humans

A handheld device sensitive to changes in colour not detectable by the human eye could be used to spot objects hidden by camouflage or foliage.

The Image Replication Imaging Spectrometer (IRIS) system was developed by Andrew Harvey and colleagues at Heriot-Watt University in the UK.

The cells in the human retina that detect coloured light are sensitive to only certain parts of the spectrum – red, green or blue. All perceived colours are a mixture of this basic palette of colours. Digital cameras work in a similar way, also using separate red, green and blue filters or sensors.

By contrast, the IRIS system has a greater basic palette, of 32 or more "colours" – bands of the light spectrum. It works by dividing an image into 32 separate snapshots, each containing only the light from one of its 32 spectral bands. This allows it to pick out features that blend into one for a human observer. "In a single snapshot we can capture subtle differences in colour that the eye can't," Harvey told New Scientist.
Colour palette

The 32 snapshots are projected onto a detector side by side, allowing the device to analyse them all simultaneously. "Until now this kind of imaging was achieved by looking at the different spectral bands sequentially in time," says Harvey, "this method is much faster." What IRIS sees can be translated into false colour images to allow a human to make use of its abilities.

Two British defence firms, Quinetiq and Selex, are working on handheld versions of the device, Harvey says, which are similar in size to a video camera: "It should be useful in, for example, a situation where they need to know if there are any artificial objects like mines or vehicles hidden in foliage."

IRIS could help reveal what is hidden, "or let soldiers know what needs further investigation", he adds.

The device is also being tested as a medical tool, in collaboration with Andy McNaught at Cheltenham General Hospital in the UK. He is using it to diagnose eye disease by looking at blood flow within the retina. This is because IRIS is sensitive enough to tell the different between oxygenated and deoxygenated blood.

Images like the one to the right can be used to look for problems with retinal blood flow, such as diabetic retinopathy – a complication of diabetes that can lead to blindness.

Original Article

Language of Surgery

Data Collected From Robotic Medical Tools Could Improve Operating Room Skills

Borrowing ideas from speech recognition research, Johns Hopkins computer scientists are building mathematical models to represent the safest and most effective ways to perform surgery, including tasks such as suturing, dissecting and joining tissue.

The team's long-term goal is to develop an objective way of evaluating a surgeon's work and to help doctors improve their operating room skills. Ultimately, the research also could enable robotic surgical tools to perform with greater precision.

The project, supported by a three-year National Science Foundation grant, has yielded promising early results in modeling suturing work. The researchers performed the suturing with the help of a robotic surgical device, which recorded the movements and made them available for computer analysis.

"Surgery is a skilled activity, and it has a structure that can be taught and acquired," said Gregory D. Hager, a professor of computer science in the university's Whiting School of Engineering and principal investigator on the project. "We can think of that structure as the language of surgery.' To develop mathematical models for this language, we're borrowing techniques from speech recognition technology and applying them to motion recognition and skills assessment."

language of surgery researchers
'Language of surgery' researchers collect data from this da Vinci robotic surgical system operated by David Yuh, a cardiac surgeon at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Standing are team members Gregory Hager, Izhak Shafran, Henry Lin and Sanjeev Khudanpur.
Photo by Will Kirk
Complicated surgical tasks, Hager said, unfold in a series of steps that resemble the way that words, sentences and paragraphs are used to convey language. "In speech recognition research, we break these down to their most basic sounds, called phonemes," he said. "Following that example, our team wants to break surgical procedures down to simple gestures that can be represented mathematically by computer software."

With that information in hand, the computer scientists hope to be able to recognize when a surgical task is being performed well and also to identify which movements can lead to operating room problems. Just as a speech recognition program might call attention to poor pronunciation or improper syntax, the system being developed by Hager's team might identify surgical movements that are imprecise or too time-consuming.
But to get to that point, computers first must become fluent in the "language" of surgery. This will require computers to absorb data concerning the best ways to complete surgical tasks. As a first step, the researchers have begun collecting data recorded by Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci Surgical Systems. These systems allow a surgeon, seated at a computer workstation, to guide robotic tools to perform minimally invasive procedures involving the heart, the prostate and other organs. Although only a tiny fraction of hospital operations involve the da Vinci, the device's value to Hager's team is that all of the robot's surgical movements can be digitally recorded and processed. In a paper presented at the Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention Conference in October 2005, Hager's team announced that it had developed a way to use data from the da Vinci to mathematically model surgical tasks such as suturing, a key first step in deciphering the language of surgery. The lead author, Johns Hopkins graduate student Henry C. Lin, received the conference award for best student paper.

da Vinci robotic system
When a surgeon operates the controls of a da Vinci robotic system, the device records these hand movements. Computer scientists are analyzing this data in their effort to understand the 'language of surgery.'
Photo by Will Kirk
"Now, we're acquiring enough data to go from words' to sentences,'" said Hager, who is deputy director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology, based at Johns Hopkins. "One of our goals for the next few years is to develop a large vocabulary that we can use to represent the motions in surgical tasks."

The team also hopes to incorporate video data from the da Vinci and possibly from minimally invasive procedures performed directly by surgeons. In such operations, surgeons insert instruments and a tiny camera into small incisions to complete a medical procedure. The video data from the camera could contribute data to the team's efforts to identify effective surgical methods.

Hager's Johns Hopkins collaborators include David D. Yuh, a cardiac surgeon from the School of Medicine. "It is fascinating to break down the surgical skills we take for granted into their fundamental components," Yuh said. "Hopefully, a better understanding of how we learn to operate will help more efficiently train future surgeons. With the significantly reduced number of hours surgical residents are permitted to be in the hospital, surgical training programs need to streamline their training methods now more than ever. This research work represents a strong effort toward this."

David Yuh, Izhak Shafran, Gregory Hager
Cardiac surgeon David Yuh controls the da Vinci robotic surgical system as computer scientists Izhak Shafran and Gregory Hager observe.
Photo by Will Kirk
Hager's other collaborators include Sanjeev Khudanpur, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Izhak Shafran, who was a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the university's Center for Language and Speech Processing and who is now an assistant professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute.

Hager cautioned that the project is not intended to produce a "Big Brother" system that would critique a surgeon's every move. "We're trying to find ways to help them become better at what they do," he said. "It's not a new idea. In sports and dance, people are studying the mechanics of movement to see what produces the best possible performance. By understanding the underlying structures, we can become better at what we do. I think surgery's no different."

Original Article