Better Robots. Safer Surgery.

Ann Majewicz Fey, Ph.D., & Yvette Williams-Brown, M.D

Robotics experts are partnering with longtime physicians, creating simulation tools to better train new surgeons and minimize errors.

Your next laparoscopic surgery could benefit.  

Minimally invasive surgery has obvious benefits: The tiny incisions involved in laparoscopic procedures cause less tissue damage than the large cuts to the abdomen of the past, speeding recovery.

Inserting surgical instruments into the body, though, requires a specialized device called a trocar to create the small incisions for instruments to pass through. A simple enough idea — but rife with potential error: By pushing too hard or aiming the trocar incorrectly, vital organs or blood vessels can suffer severe injury. For surgeons in training, it’s a daunting prospect.

Enter Ann Majewicz Fey, Ph.D., associate professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering. Since her arrival at the university in 2019 to direct the Human-Enabled Robotic Technology Laboratory, Fey has been working with Yvette Williams-Brown, M.D., to better understand how simulated skills translate to the operating room.

Partnerships
  • Cockrell School of Engineering
  • Dell Medical School

Williams-Brown is an associate professor in Dell Med’s Department of Women’s Health and director of the Minimally Invasive Gynecologic Surgery Fellowship. With her clinical input, Fey’s team built a new device for simulating trocar insertion, now undergoing patent review.

“Even though it’s ‘just’ the beginning of a surgical operation, these are important skills for both beginners to learn and for experienced professionals to refine,” says Williams-Brown. “It’s surprisingly hard to find good simulation methods without actually working on a live patient, and as an educator, when manual skills like these are taught, it’s hard to verbalize how something is supposed to feel. You don’t put your hands on top of their hands. As a trainer, you can't feel the forces that they’re exerting onto the tissue.”

Engineering, Meet Medicine

For the trocar insertion simulator, a few key pieces of input resulted in significant design changes. Example: Williams-Brown noted that when she inserts a trocar, she’s often focused on what the laparoscopic camera shows her while she presses down on the abdominal tissue. The result? Fey’s team integrated a visualization with the simulator so training surgeons can watch a graphical representation of what fat or muscle looks like while it’s pierced.

“That's something nobody had ever told me,” Fey says. “Even in my years of visiting operating rooms and watching trocar insertions, I didn't realize how critically important that screen and visualization was. And it was just one little comment.

“But broadly, there’s an enthusiasm and energy at UT and at Dell Med, I think, to be able to kind of push the boundary and to be risky or try something different. There are clinicians that are willing to make the time to meet, and two seconds of a conversation can turn into something really incredible and take what you're working on to a whole new level to realize the impact. It’s what drew a lot of people here, myself included.”