Interview with Axel Krieger and Justin Opfermann: autonomous robotic laparoscopic surgery for intestinal anastomosis

Axel Krieger is the Head of the Intelligent Medical Robotic Systems and Equipment (IMERSE) Lab at Johns Hopkins University, where Justin Opfermann is pursuing his PhD degree. Below, Axel and Justin tell us more about their work, the methodology, and what they are planning next. Our research is focused on the design and evaluation of medical robots for autonomous soft tissue surgeries. In particular, this paper describes a surgical robot and workflow to perform autonomous anastomosis of the small bowel. Performance of the robot is conducted in synthetic tissues against expert surgeons, followed by experiments in pig studies to demonstrate preclinical feasibility of the system and approach.