Zonghe Chua

Surgeon skill is a strong predictor of patients’ post-operative outcomes, such as length of hospital stay and occurrence of complications. One important skill, tissue handling ability, is thought to be difficult to learn in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery due to the lack of haptic (touch) feedback. Expert surgeons overcome this limitation by learning how to estimate force visually. My research investigates how this ability can be developed in junior robotic surgeons through haptics-based training and in intelligent computer vision models. Collaborating closely with clinical experts like Dr. Wren, I use neuroscientific principles to inform the application of robotics, haptics, and AI to this problem.