The RoSS simulator was developed by Thenkurussi
(“Kesh”) Kesavadas, PhD, professor of mechanical and
aerospace engineering at UB, right; and surgeon Khurshid Guru, MD,
director of the Center for Robotic Surgery at Roswell Park Cancer
Institute.
One of the world’s first simulators to closely approximate
the “touch and feel” of the da Vinci™ robotic
surgical system was developed through a collaboration between the
Center for Robotic Surgery at Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI)
and the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
The most widely used system of its kind in the world, the da
Vinci robotic surgical system affords all the features that an
experienced surgeon needs to ensure equivalent or superior outcomes
to conventional surgery.
However, such a surgical system, like an aircraft, is only as
good as the pilot, and the training required for proficiency in
robot-assisted surgery has been insufficient.
The Robotic Surgical Simulator, or RoSS—which debuted in
2010—addresses the rapidly growing need for a realistic
training environment for robot-assisted surgery, a field that is
expanding exponentially and is expected to constitute a significant
number of all surgeries by 2015.
“Think of the RoSS as a flight simulator for
surgeons,” explains Thenkurussi (“Kesh”)
Kesavadas, PhD, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering
at UB and head of its Virtual Reality Lab.
Kesavadas co-invented the RoSS with Khurshid A. Guru, MD,
director of the Center for Robotic Surgery at RPCI.
“Until RoSS, surgeons did not have sufficient
opportunities outside of the operating room to gain extensive
training in robotic techniques,” says Guru, whose own
surgical expertise has made RPCI’s robotics program a Center
of Excellence and a world leader in physician training in
robotics.
Robotic surgeries are generally less invasive, cause less pain,
require shorter hospital stays and allow faster recoveries than
conventional surgery. Robotic-surgical systems are increasingly
being used for gynecologic, gastrointestinal, cardiothoracic,
pediatric and other urologic surgeries.
UB’s Virtual Reality Lab is one of very few such labs in
the nation to focus on developing haptic
technologies—technologies that bring a sense of touch to
virtual reality.
“Our experience using computers to transmit accurately the
real-time feel and touch of surgery is what enabled us to work with
Roswell Park to create a training system that provides a highly
realistic simulation of robotic surgery,” says Kesavadas.
The SUNY Research Foundation and Health Research, Inc., the
technology transfer arm of Roswell Park, jointly licensed the RoSS
technology to Simulated Surgical Systems, LLC.
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