News

Dear visitor,

Many thanks for the many hits and interest over the last years - we are move to a static website !
But feel free to directly contact the PI's ... to follow up the latest !

E. Vander Poorten,

EurEyeCase co-organises the 2nd workshop on Advances in Image-Guided Opthalmic Interventions

EurEyeCase co-organises the workshop, speakers from MLL and ACMIT will report on their experiences working towards in-vivo validation of sensor-based robot-assisted vitreoretinal interventions.

More info on the workshop can be found here.

The agenda of the day can be found below.

Matteo Cereda was awarded the gold medal as the best presentation for his talk on EurEyeCase's animal and human trial at the Italian Group of Vitreo-Retina Specialists.

Congrats Matteo !!

Eindhoven, 21 February 2018 – Preceyes B.V. (Eindhoven, the Netherlands) and partners developed and integrated a distance sensor in Preceyes’ robot. The sensor measures the distance of an instrument from the retina in real time. The integrated device has been successfully used in a world’s first clinical validation at Rotterdam Eye Hospital (Rotterdam, the Netherlands). Providing sensor-based safety and guidance, the robot-sensor combination promises significant safety and performance benefits for retinal surgery. Moreover, the sensor will be a source of data for training and evaluation. Read more

The following pair of papers, led by ETHZ were accepted for publication at RA-L and CVPR respectively

 'Automatic Tool Landmark Detection for Stereo Vision in Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery'

was accepted at Robotics and Automation Letters/ICRA 2018.  This paper presents the pipeline used on Eureyecase for calibration of the stereo-microscope, and 3D reconstruction. By using the robot coordinates to calibrate and reconstruct, we get rid of checkerboards and unnecessary equipment. Registration, reconstruction, and calibration are all solved in a single pipeline. The project is an outcome of collaboration between ETHZ and KUL, and achieves ~100μm accuracy in 3D reconstruction of the retina. Video at http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~kmaninis/keypoints2stereo/.

'Deep Extreme Cut: From Extreme Points to Object Segmentation'

from ETHZ was accepted at CVPR 2018 : https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.09081.pdf.

The paper studies alternative methods for annotating new segmentation datasets by using extreme clicks, instead of full pixel-level annotations that are expensive to obtain. The method can be used to efficiently label medical datasets as well.

Rozemarijn Weijers, former student at Eindhoven University of Technology, has won the IMDI Talent Award 2016-2017. She wrote an algorithm for a sensor, so that an eye surgery robot together with the eye surgeon obtain a better view in the eye. The goal is to make eye operations faster and safer, but also to enable new interventions on a microscopic level.

The EurEyeCase project was invited to present the latest advances in the European Robotics Week (ERW) the 20^th of November 2017. EurEyeCase participated in the Health Robotics session, at the European Committee of the Region, Brussels. This initiative aimed to bring robotics research closer to the public. During this session, other research groups and companies were also involved, such as:

Murab projet, SoftPro project, Imec.WONDER & Imec.ROBOCURE, BabyRobot’s, Brubotics/VUB Exoskeleton project or Endoo European Project.

Below you can find some pictures of the event:

At the IWOBI 2017 - 5th IEEE International Work Conference on Bioinspired Intelligence /July 10-13, 2017 - Funchal, Madeira Island/, the ACMIT team (M. Kozlovszky, R. Dóczi, E. Jósvai and G. Kronreif) has been awarded with the Best Paper Award. In his presentation, Miklos Kozlovszky explained the results of their research within the EurEyeCase project. The paper was focusing especially the novel work on the use of an automatic event handling software framework, which can be used effectively during robot assisted eye surgery.

The Medizinische Laserzentrum Lübeck presented the latest results on the recently developed high precision optical distance sensor at the European Conference on Biomedical Optics. The presented poster “Long working distance OCT-probes for robot-assisted eye surgery” addressed the conformity between the simulation routine and built probes, possible aberrations resulting from the small aperture and the general measuring performance [poster]. Despite the small diameter no significant influence on axial resolution or signal quality has been found, while yielding a measuring range in the centimeter regime. Therefore the first lot of probes has been produced, which gets the EurEyeCase team closer to a clinical evaluation.

As severe retinal damages can be caused by undesired collisions between surgical tools and the retinal wall, it is important to develop tracking tool methods with good distance perception to the retina.  This tool tracking is only possible if the different positions of the instrument (i.e., needle) in the operating room are known, with respect to the stereo-microscope and to the robot.

The Rotterdam Eye Hospital and Preceyes have signed a strategic agreement for clinical development and application of a surgery robot. The purpose is to use the robot in retinal surgery to help patients more accurately and safely in the future. The robot also allows new treatments that can help with a better treatment of retinal diseases.

The full press release could be find here.

The meeting took place on Thursday 18 May 2017 with developers from TU/e, KUL, ETHZ, OPMed, and ACMIT at ACMIT HQ, in Wiener Neustadt, Austria.

iOCT examples are illustrated in the figure: the left image shows 3D iOCT, a top view photo and live iOCT during DMEK surgery. The thin Descemet membrane is clearly visible in the anterior segment of the eye. Right next to it the 3D iOCT, a top view photo and live iOCT shows the Retina during membrane peeling.

After two recent successful events (namely the experimental campaign and the second year project review) the refactoring phase of the EurEyeCase Guiding software version 1 has been started. The feature requests received from the medical experts have been already incorporated in the new release and we are ready to move to the further planned steps. Beside the code refactoring the developer team is focusing now on the documentation for the clinical trials. The next few months will be challenging as the time is ticking fast and the preparation for the ethical approval is approaching.

A general paper about "Single Scan OCT-based Retina Detection for Robot-assisted Retinal Vein Cannulation" by Gianni Borghesan, Laure Esteveny, Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrant, Peter Koch, Dominiek Reynaerts and Emmanuel Vander Poorten, from KUL and MLL, has been submitted to the Journal of Medical Robotics Research. 

On Saturday the 4^th of March 2017, Maarten Beelen form Preceyes gave a talk at the Ramses meeting in Maastricht, The Netherlands. This conference concerns multispecialty robotic microsurgery. The talk of Beelen, titled ‘A new robot for Eye surgery’ addressed the Preceyes system and ongoing developments within EurEyeCase. News coverage of the conference, including a demonstration with soccer robots, is available https://limburg.bbvms.com/view/website/2769058.html.

The force sensing cannulation technology further developed in EEC has already been picked up by the latest review paper on the subject by Johns Hopkins University. The paper "Robotic Vitreoretinal Surgery" by Channa et al. is online available through https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27893625.

After two years of intensive work and collaboration between all partners, the EurEyeCase team successfully demonstrated their main achievements to the European Commission during the 2^nd year review meeting on 8^th of March 2017 in Leuven. While during the first year the emphasis was very much on develop the different components (more details available on https://www.eureyecase.eu/about/publications), a fully integrated platform - i.e composed of robot, instruments, supervising software, OCT and stereo-vision - was the result of the 2^nd year. All these efforts form a strong basis to progress the project towards new research topics and clinical validation. Indeed in the third year of the project, focus will shift towards the work by the clinical partners, who, tightly collaborating with the technical partners, will validate in great detail the different technological tools.