Professor Pietro Valdastri and his robotic surgery group at the University of Leeds have joined the Sonopill Programme. Prof. Valdastri's expertise will help develop the positioning and localisation work within the Sonopill project over the next 18 months.

Prof Valdastri is Chair of Robotics and Autonomous Systems and Director of the Institute of Robotics, Autonomous Systems and Sensing, having previously been at Vanderbilt University, where he founded the Science and Technologies Of Robotics in Medicine (STORM) Lab (https://my.vanderbilt.edu/stormlab/), a research lab focusing on medical capsule robots for gastrointestinal endoscopy and abdominal surgery.

With specialist knoweledge of “Medical Capsule Robots”, meso-scale devices that leverage extreme miniaturization to access and operate in environments that are out of reach for larger robots, and can be designed to enter the human body through natural orifices or small incisions to perform endoscopy and surgery while minimizing the invasiveness of the procedure, Prof Valdastri's approach is a prefect match for the ethos behind the Sonopill programme.

First published: 9 March 2017

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