 Welcome to the Catharobotic Surgery Center. We are very proud to show you around in our new facility. We have a room which we call the VR simulation area, which is a room which we use for simulation trainings, mainly in minimally invasive surgery. It has three virtual simulators in there. The core part of our center consists of three different theaters. We have a smaller theater on the left-hand side where you already see one of our surgical robots. That theater is what we call our tele-mentoring theater. And tele-mentoring actually is a quite new principle where we are going to have the mentor or the trainer being abroad and the trainees here. What is unique about this theater is that we are going to have a high bond with life link to operating rooms abroad, for instance in the United States, UK or Europe. We will have the trainer who is an expert surgeon in his own operating theater together with a patient or without a patient who can train our trainees here in the Catharobotic Surgery Center. We can also reverse this and do this the other way around. We can move one of our robots into this theater, we can have the trainee working on the robot and we can have the trainer abroad seeing the same 3D images as what our trainee is seeing and teaching him how to do his surgery, correcting him by giving him indications. So this is actually quite a new innovation where we can send 3D images together with voice, together with 2D images across the ocean, both ways around, and we can use it for making our training sessions more efficient and we can include more than one trainer from different parts of the world in the same training. We think that adds a lot of value to surgical training. The main theater is here centrally. This is a theater which we will use for training of larger groups. We have a surgical robot obviously in the center of that theater. We also have four LCD screens on the side to show information, to show surgical videos, to show PowerPoint presentations and then the most important thing is centrally. What you see right now is a projection screen. We have a 3D projector right in top of the ceiling so we can show to our trainees 3D videos where they really see the surgical field in 3D. As you can see it on the robot. So what you see behind me is actually one of the two surgical robots that we have available in Katara Botic Surgery Center. As you can see the surgical robots consist of three different parts. The part right here is what we call the brain of the robot. It has obviously a 3D screen here which shows the surgical field. It also has software and hardware for image processing etc. A more important part here are actually the arms of the robot. As you can see the robot has four arms which are actually two surgeons then. This is the bed where the patient is positioned and these arms actually do the real surgery. Now still the most important part of the robot is this part. That's what we call the surgeon console. The surgeon is very comfortably seated here and thus all the movements inside the console with his hands while he has a 3D image of the surgical field. Those movements of the surgeon are translated in movements of the arms of the robot and that's why the surgeon is actually entirely controlling the surgical movements. Right now I am seated at the surgeon console of one of our robots. You can see that I'm comfortably seated and my head rests in a screen where I have a 3D vision of the surgical field. When I move my hands this motion is translated to the arms of the robot which are then working inside of the patient. Right now obviously I'm not working with a real patient. I'm playing kind of a game. As you can see the plastic model I'm playing with is quite small. Also the rings are very small but because we have a 3D camera and a very high quality image it's relatively easy to grab rings to place them on top of one of the spikes. So you can imagine that a surgeon using this in a real surgery can perform surgeries with a lot more precision and perform very difficult surgical tasks on a lot easier way than he could do in normal open or minimally invasive surgery. So now I'm working on one of our 3 virtual simulators that we have available in the Katara Botic Surgery Center. So those virtual simulators as you can see are a 3D simulated surgical environment which is used for training purposes. So this is a typical simulator that is used for training in minimally invasive surgery or keyhole surgery where the surgeon only has access to a few very small incisions in the body of the patient to the area where he wants to work. You can understand that it's quite difficult for a starting surgeon who is used to doing open surgery to work under these restrictions. These simulators we have available are a tool that help the surgeon to learn how to do his surgery in this new way by training them in a virtual environment before they go and train on animals and before they actually perform surgeries on patients. Mr Yanuins, thank you so much for taking the time for this interview and we'd like to know about the Katara Botic Surgery Center. When did it start? Well actually the Katara Botic Surgery Center is an initiative of Her Highness Sheikh Hamoza. She had the idea of starting a center or an activity in robotic surgery when she was visiting Imperial College in London when they had her centenary in 2007. She visited a very important department in Imperial College where they do a lot of research and development in the field of robotic surgery and she saw the potential of the technology for her country for Qatar and for the Middle East as a region and therefore she decided to task QSTP, Qatar Science and Technology Park to establish a center in this field. So we'd like to know about the missions and objects of the center. So the Katara Botic Surgery Center is actually doing three things at once. In the first place we are a training center. So we want to train surgeons, nurses, hospital staff, we want to train hospital management and we want to train researchers in robotic surgery. Our second activity is doing technology development. So we are establishing currently a small group who does research and development activities in the field of medical robotics and related areas. Very important in that aspect is that we want to work with local and international partners. So we have already two collaborations with local partners, Qatar University and Texas A&M and we are actively seeking to expand it to more local partners like Bill Cornell, Hamat Medical and to international partners like Imperial College in London, American University of Beirut, universities in the US and in Canada. Then our third activity is actually demonstration of new surgical technologies. So we have a very nice facility as you have seen. We want to use this facility to demonstrate exciting new technologies in the field of surgery and we think this is a unique opportunity both for trainees as well as for companies to be able to show their new inventions to surgeons. The center employs high-end virtual reality surgical simulators. So for our general public who really don't know what this is, can you please highlight on the simulators and what they do? It's a lot of pleasure. So the surgical simulators is actually, you can compare them with a kind of a play station which is used not for playing around, but which is used for the purpose of training surgeons. The surgical simulators we have here are focused on what they call minimally invasive surgery or keyhole surgery. So actually that is a kind of surgery which is supposed to open surgery and only makes a few small holes in the human body and the surgeon does the surgery based on those small incisions. So that's a technology which has a lot of advantages for the patient, but it's very difficult for the surgeon to learn how to do minimally invasive surgery and that's why we train them on surgical simulators. Those simulators are actually a 3D simulated environment, a computer model which has force feedback. So the surgeon if he pulls something or cuts something he actually feels the pressure of the tissue he's cutting or pulling. So it's a very sophisticated tool for training surgeons how to do minimally invasive surgery. Of course this is only one part of the training. The surgeon has to be trained on animal lab, he has to be trained on, trained is a bad word, but he has to practice on real patients before he really becomes an expert on it. But this is certainly an important step and the unique thing about us being a center in surgical simulation is the fact that this is a technology which is used a lot in the United States and used a lot in Europe, but it's not used a lot in the Middle East. So we're actually the first center who uses it extensively in trainings in the Middle East and we think that's an important asset to cutter and to the region. How has robotic surgery, the center, how has it created or will create an achievement in the field of medical surgery? How do you think that is possible? Well, I have to explain you one small bit first. So I already told you that the evolution of surgery has started obviously with open surgery, what we all know, which is fine, but which causes a lot of injury to the body of the patient and in recent decades minimally invasive surgery has been developed, which is a lot better for the patient because you only use small incisions to do the surgery, but obviously it's a lot more difficult for the surgeon to do the surgery and to treat the patient in minimally invasive surgery. Now robotic surgery is actually an invention which is a lot more recent. It's only on the market for 10 years more or less, which is a technology which also does minimally invasive surgery by using a robot or a master slave system. And actually this robotic surgery makes it a lot easier for the surgeon to do this very difficult minimally invasive surgery. It has the benefits for the surgeon that he has a 3D image of the surgical field. He can zoom that image so he can see things 10 times larger than they are in reality and he can also scale his movement. So if he moves his hand 10 cm in reality he can make sure that the robot only moves 1 cm. So those are important achievements which bring about that robotic surgery is a lot more safe for the patient and it causes a lot less injury to the patient and the patient has to recover for a much shorter period. If I can give you one example about this what actually happened here in Qatar in Hamat Medical Hospital is that one of the surgeons where we collaborate with, his name is Dr. Abdul Wahid Almoula, he's a cardiothoracic surgeon. He has done several surgeries which were beating heart, coronary artery bypass surgery. So actually it's a minimally invasive surgery where he does a bypass of one of the arteries to the heart. I've seen a few of those surgeries it's a very difficult surgery certainly very difficult to do that minimally invasive but doing that with a robot has tremendous advantages for the patient. The patient stays in the hospital after surgery for 2 or 3 days and then he walks out of the hospital while if you do this in open surgery where you have to make a very large incision in the body the risk of infection is a lot higher and the patient will have to recover in the hospital for several weeks and has a very much longer recovery period at home before he's back to normal. So is it applicable to all surgeries? No, it isn't. Robotic surgery is applicable to soft tissue surgeries and it is mainly developed for urology for cardiothoracic surgeries and for gynecology. Gynecology is relatively new but it's growing very fast. Now in recent years and months the surgery is also being developed for ENT and that's ear, nose and throat surgeries where they actually have the robot operate through the mouth of the patient. So it is an exciting technology it is quite young there's a lot of development going on in new procedures, new applications improvements of the robotic platform and my opinion is that we will see a lot more of robotic surgery in the near and more distant future but right now it already has tremendous applications. For instance in urology the most important procedure is prostatectomy which is prostate removal. In the United States the percentage of all prostatectomies are already performed country wide by using a robot. So basically robotic surgery has taken over that procedure already in the United States and we expect to do it exactly the same in Middle East and Asia. So you mentioned earlier that the center will be doing demonstrations for surgical technologies can you highlight on that? So as I mentioned we have a very nice center here our two other activities are training which means that we will have a lot of trainees, a lot of surgeons nurses hospital staff in our center on a regular basis to become trained. Our second activity is technology development so we have a profile of a center which contributes to advancement in medical technologies. Now the third activity is demonstration and we think with those two other activities this complements perfectly well. So we are actually looking for collaborations with companies who want to demonstrate their newest technologies their newest products in our center, who want to show it to our trainees and who eventually want to organize events in our center using our network using our infrastructure to demonstrate their products and technologies. Now we do not intend to become a commercial organization we are not a sales arm of distributors of surgical technologies and we never want to become that but we think we have a quite neutral position in the fields which gives us the opportunity to introduce surgeons and potential future users to the newest technologies give them the opportunity to test them to play with it and form their own opinion and we have a neutral stand we can just offer the platform but we are not doing sales for distributors or producers of surgical technologies. So how do you think the center is close to being the region's large surgical simulation facility? It's very difficult to obtain exact information about this but I think we currently have three surgical simulators in our facility which are being used for training we have the plan to purchase six additional of those simulators I am very sure that with nine simulators in total we are going to be the biggest simulation facility in surgery in the region I am quite convinced that right now with those three simulators we are already one of the biggest in the region. Do you think one day robots can replace human surgeons or can they pose a competition for human surgeons or both will complement each other and none will cease to exist? The surgical robots as they are today actually the robot is a wrong term actually it is a master slave system it means that the surgeon is the master and the machine is the slave it doesn't work without a surgeon you need to have a surgeon who actually uses the machine in order to perform the surgery better so actually what is created by combining a surgeon and what we call the robot you create a super surgeon that's actually what you are doing without a surgeon it doesn't work and it will never work. Another question I know our viewers are seeing this robot behind you so can you tell us more about it how it works for which surgery it performs? Well the robot you are seeing behind me actually consists of three parts the part on the left hand side is what we call the brain of the robot it has all the software in there it has all the 3D visualization equipment etc the part in the middle is the part where you see the surgical bed where the patient is going to be positioned and you have the forearms of the robot who actually perform the surgery and then on the right hand side there is the surgeon console so the surgeon is going to be seated on the console and is going to perform the surgery he is controlling everything that is happening on the patient he is seated very comfortably and he rests his head in a 3D console where he sees a 3D image of the surgical field and therefore has a very comfortable way of doing highly precise surgeries So I know also many of our viewers would like to know the relevance of the center to Qatar how can it be an added value Well I think you should see the added value of the guitar robotic surgery center in different aspects in the first place what we are doing here is something unique in the region and unique in the world we are creating a center of expertise in Qatar together with our local and international partners which are very important for us we want to really build Qatar into a hub for excellence in robotic surgery I know that also Hamad Medical Corporation has the same vision to build their expertise in clinical practice of robotic surgery into something which is respected all over the region and all over the world and I think they are well under way in realizing that Now what we contribute as Qatar robotic surgery center to Qatar is obviously we are creating in a very small promising niche market and niche activity we are creating something in Qatar which is relevant on world level which is unique on world level and by doing that Qatar will become important in that specific niche market of surgical robotic technologies that's one let's say more the economical relevance of QRC for Qatar more social relevance of Qatar robotic surgery center is obviously that we will push and drive clinical implication of robotic surgery in the hospitals in the country and in the region and this will bring about that patients are treated better they get the best care that is available worldwide by using robotic surgery for certain applications and we think that we together will support our clinical partners like Hammett Medical are already realizing this right now and are already bringing better care to patients in this country right now We also like to know about the partnerships the center is going to take as you mentioned earlier in one of your answers so please highlight on the partnerships that you plan to perform in the future That's a very good question the fact of the matter is that we realize this very well that this center cannot work on its own if we attract the best people all over the world to come and work here but we don't cooperate with local partners we will be at best an island of excellence in the country but we will not really generate a lot of value for the country so that's why in all of our activities we actually have a very active partnership approach in technology development that's very obvious we have already submitted two projects in a very early stage of our center with the Qatar National Research Fund both projects are with local partners one of the projects is also with an international partner that's American University of Beirut and we intend to extend that in the next round of Qatar National Research Fund by submitting a lot more projects with different partners in Qatar we are speaking with Will Cornell we are speaking with Carnegie Mellon we are speaking with Hamat Medical Corporation and also extend international collaborations by working with Imperial College in London by working with Canadian universities and by working with a lot of other top universities and hospitals in the world for training we also have a very active partnership approach the first things we did even before starting to construct this center here on the ground is collaborate with Hamat Medical Center on training six of their surgeons to become top experts in robotic surgery we didn't do the training in Qatar because we didn't have the center yet but we trained them through our international partners Imperial College in London and another training institution in France to become experts in the field and as a result right now and that's not our credit that's the credit of Hamat Medical Corporation there are already up to 40 surgeries using the robot that have been performed in Hamat Hospital right now and the surgeons that we help train are actually becoming experts step by step in using the surgical robots now in training we will also work with international top experts and that's actually the version of Qatar robotic surgery center we do not want to be just a training center we want to provide our trainees with the best training that is available and in order to do so we realize that we have to attract the best trainers so we will work with international top surgeons in order to provide top training one of the things we have planned right now is on 8 and 9th of April 2010 our first training session that's a training session in cardiothoracic surgery where we have invited one of the top robotic surgeons of the world who is by coincidence also a Belgian surgeon and he's going to be the main trainer when we do our training session now we will obviously not rely only on foreign trainers we will also use the local experts the six surgeons I spoke about and we hope that more are to come in the future who are katharis or working and living in Qatar and who become experts in their specialty in the field of robotic surgery we will use them as our local experts in our training programs and of course we also have our own staff we have a doctor on board who is an expert in surgical robots we have a PhD an engineer on board who is a technical expert in surgical robots we will look in the future for additional people so we will have our own core staff who can provide at least the basic part of our training programs without having to use surgeons or use top experts from all over the world thank you so much for this interview and we wish you all the best of luck