Arianna Menciassi of The BioRobotics Institute - Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna

Targeted therapy was born as a response to the quest for precision, reliability, repeatability, and minimal access, both in surgery and in therapeutic procedures.

After introducing some definitions for setting the stage in the field, this talk will deal with different approaches for reaching the interventional area and for bringing the therapeutic actions where needed. This objective has been pursued in different ways in the state of the art, depending on the target area and on the required forces for performing the interventional tasks. Robotics and image-guided solutions naturally answer the quest for improving accuracy and reliability. Articulated robots, able to enter the human body through minimal access or a natural orifice have been developed by exploiting smart transmission mechanisms. In parallel, soft robotic technologies have evolved to answer the quest for safe interaction and improved flexibility. The evolution towards soft robots for surgery has been also driven by the evolution of endoscopes, which have pushed the technology from simple inspection devices to advanced interventional tools with sophisticated on-the-tip solutions.

The quest for minimal invasiveness in surgery and therapy has steered the research interest towards wireless energy delivery methods. Ultrasound and magnetic fields have the potential to change the paradigm of targeted therapy, by reaching in a scarless way all human body organs and by triggering different effects, from dragging to propulsion and ablation. In this scenario, the typical challenge of realizing efficient transmission mechanisms for robots is transforming into the challenge of focusing the wireless energy deep into the body and with limited side effects. This talk aims to present the above mentioned trends, with the support of specific examples coming from the speaker experience and her collaboration network.

Biography:

Arianna Menciassi graduated in Physics at the Pisa University (1995), she obtained the Ph.D. (1999) at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA, Pisa, Italy) and she was visiting professor in different universities in France since 2014 (Pierre and Marie Curie, in Paris, Besancon University, in Besancon). She is a Full Professor of Biomedical Robotics at SSSA and team leader of the “Surgical Robotics & Allied Technologies” Area at The BioRobotics Institute. She is the Coordinator of the Ph.D. in Biorobotics since 2018, and she was appointed in 2019 as Vice-Rector of the Scuola Sant'Anna.

Her main research interests involve surgical robotics, micro robotics for biomedical applications, biomechatronic artificial organs, smart and soft solutions for biomedical devices.

She served on the Editorial Board of the IEEE-ASME Trans. on Mechatronics and she has been Topic Editor of the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (2013-2020). In 2018 she was appointed as Editor of APL Bioengineering and of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics. She is Associate Editor for Soft Robotics and she serves as Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Robotics from Jan. 2021.

She received the Well-tech Award (Milan, Italy) for her research on endoscopic capsules, and she was awarded by the Tuscany Region with the Gonfalone D’Argento, as one of the best 10 young talents of the region. Recently, she has been awarded the KUKA Innovation Award, for her activities on robotic-assisted focused ultrasound.

Address:Pisa, Toscana, Italy