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Robotic surgery is a minimally invasive surgical procedure surgeon controls the robotic instruments with hand movements from a console to perform operation.

Medical Device Research

March 2023 - May 2025

During my junior year, I joined another research lab in the Center for Advanced Surgical & Interventional Technology (CASIT) under UCLA Health. Under Dr. Rory Geoghegan, I conducted research to incorporate fiber Bragg sensing to detect tissue stiffness, ultimately providing surgeons with haptic feedback during robotic surgery. I work directly with the da Vinci Si Surgical System, made by Intuitive Surgical, Inc.

da Vinci Si Surgical System from Intuitive Surgical

Some of the work I’ve completed so far includes:

• Created a protocol for manufacturing our FBG sensors, using PDMS, 3D-printed molds, and epoxy to attach the fiber to surgical forcep
• Utilized a customized bench-top set-up of 3D-printed mounts and restraints to gather grasping data from optical encoders attached to the rotating pulleys of the surgical forceps
• Discovered method to bypass magnetic and inductive barriers within the da Vinci system to attach our customized pair of forceps to the system for human-operated experimentation.

I’ve been able to co-author a couple of poster presentations so far, including one co-first author on “Characterizing Robotic Surgery Instrument Kinematics When Under Human Control” at UCLA’s Bioengineering Research Day in November of 2024.

Poster at UCLA BE Research Day

©2024 Aaron Li