Project Objectives

The goal of FUTURA is to design, develop and assess an innovative robotic platform for the delivery of non-invasive therapy by means of High Intensity Focused Ultrasounds. The expected contribution is to advance robustness, accuracy, precision and reliability of the therapy, as well as improving safety and acceptability of multifunctional robotic platforms in the surgical room.

Four main objectives are addressed in FUTURA:

Objective 1: Merging surgical robotics, non-invasive ultrasound therapy and machine learning for medical imaging.

Objective 2: Development of a multifunctional robotic surgical platform able to perform different tasks and which possesses cognitive capabilities such as collision avoidance and obstacle perception.

Objective 3: Improvement of planning and monitoring of Ultrasound therapy.

This objective aims at exploiting robotics and machine learning approaches for improving therapy planning and monitoring. As a matter of fact, current strategies suffer from lacks and drawbacks: planning of the intervention is highly operator-dependent and monitoring strategies are limited to 2D imaging despite the intrinsic tridimensional characteristics of the therapy. Finally, Magnetic Resonance is the gold standard for therapy monitoring while it suffers from drawbacks such as low frame rate, problems of compatibility with common instrumentation and constrained environment.

Objective 4: Improvement of therapy delivery.

Therapy delivery is expected to be improved with respect to the state-of-the-art. Main advantages of the foreseen solution are the advanced positioning of the probes and the on-line 3D motion compensation.