March 20, 2026 | Autonomous volumetric soft tissue laser resection!
I'm super proud of our upcoming paper, which was accepted to ICRA 2026, on collaborative work with the Brain Tool Lab at Duke. It has the first ever demonstration of a robot autonomously resecting (cutting away) a volume of tissue using lasers. Others have done line cuts (that's how we do laser eye surgery), bone cutting, or cauterization, but not a whole volume like this! One of the student authors, Devi Yuliarti, made this great video about the paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnwhNJGcEeQ&feature=youtu.be and you can read the pre-print at https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17777
Kudos especially to Ravi Prakash and Vincent Wang for their innovation, creativity, and hard work they put into this!