Advances in Intelligent Minimally Invasive Surgical Robots

Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, minimally invasive procedures have become common practice in many surgical interventions, with huge benefits for patients and physicians. This advance goes hand-in-hand with the great technical advances of medical robots in recent years. Medical robots have allowed us to reduce the invasiveness of surgeries by providing more sophisticated tools to operate, with higher accuracy and range of motion. But the benefits of this new generation of medical devices are not limited to their superior movement capacity. Improvements in machine learning techniques are providing medical robots with more decision making and autonomy skills. Thus, medical robots are beginning to play an active part in operating theatres as their capacity for analyzing and understanding the medical environment increases.

The aim of this Special Issue is to advance medical robot research, the automation of medical procedures, surgical scene understanding and decision making, surgical skill assessment, new medical devices, and related areas. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Intelligent medical devices;
• Autonomous surgical tasks;
• Machine learning in minimally invasive procedures;
• Medical imaging for surgical scene understanding;
• The design of new advanced medical devices;
• Human–robot interfaces for medical procedures.

Dr. Irene Rivas Blanco
Dr. Carlos J. Pérez Del Pulgar
Guest Editors

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