Events

ARQ Research Seminar: Towards Autonomy in Robot-Assisted Surgery, by Prof Miloš Žefran

Date:	Monday 17 November 2025 15:00 - 16:30
Location:	Mile End Campus Engineering Building G27

ARQ Research Seminar

Speaker: Prof Miloš Žefran
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Chicago

Title: Towards Autonomy in Robot-Assisted Surgery

Robot-assisted surgery (RAS) provides significant benefits over traditional open and laparoscopic procedures. It also offers the possibility of automating surgical interventions, particularly in light of recent advances in visual computing. My talk will describe our research program towards automating robotic cholecystectomy, a procedure well-suited for automation due to its standardized steps and anatomical clarity. First, I will introduce our publicly available Comprehensive Robotic Cholecystectomy Dataset (CRCD), a multimodal dataset captured during ex vivo cholecystectomy procedures on porcine tissues using the da Vinci Research Kit. This dataset, contributed by seven surgeons of varying expertise, includes synchronized kinematic data, pedal inputs, endoscope trajectories, and annotated visual features, addressing critical gaps in existing surgical datasets. Next, I will present a vision-based autonomous dissection framework for dual-arm cholecystectomy that integrates real-time segmentation, keypoint detection, and adaptive tissue manipulation. The system leverages the CRCD dataset and achieves good performance in ex vivo evaluations. Finally, I will introduce RASRAG, a tree-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework built on RankLLaMA. RASRAG organizes surgical knowledge hierarchically, delivering clinically relevant answers that outperform existing LLM and RAG baselines. In addition to its potential use in surgical education and certification, RASRAG can be employed as a high-level task planner.

Bio: Miloš Žefran
Miloš Žefran received a M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He received a M.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. degree in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. He was an NSF Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. He then joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago where he is currently a Professor. He is also the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Engineering. He was on the faculty at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and held a visiting position at the University of Pisa, Italy. His research interests are in robotics and control with the focus on human-robot interaction, robot-assisted surgery and interpretability of machine learning. He has published over 100 journal and conference papers and is a recipient of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award. He was the associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology and the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering.

Arranged by:	Queen Mary University of London
Contact:	Kaspar Althoefer
Email:	k.althoefer@qmul.ac.uk
People:	Kaspar ALTHOEFER Ketao ZHANG
Research Centres:	Intelligent Transport Bioengineering