 Fran, are you still down in the labyrinth or have you escaped? I did a rover, but it's a little bit of sort of out of the frame pan and into the fire for me because I am here with a robotic arm behind me which apparently is used for eye surgery which Carlo, who is from King's College London, you're not going to do the surgery on me, are you? I don't know, we'll see. No, we won't. So what is it that we've got here? We have a nice setup with a 7 degree of freedom robotic arm which holds the surgical robot which helps surgeons to deliver a better and faster surgery for the patients more precise and at a microscopic scale. Amazing, can we take a closer look? Yeah, absolutely, follow me. Here we go. So here we have Shamsa who will also help us run in the robot, run in the automatic functions and keeping us safe. Brilliant. And this is our fake eye. So we'll do the surgery here. And this is our robot. Brilliant. Okay, so that's got the 7 degrees of freedom which means it's sort of, I suppose, is that 7 joints that can move in 7 different ways? Exactly, yeah, that's perfect. And in a second we are going to manipulate it and if you like you can help me to do that. I would love to do that Carlo, yeah. What do we do? So, let's go. You can press play. Thank you very much. So now we gently, you can hold the handle. Okay. And we gently drive the robot towards the eye. You've said gently twice, I will be gentle. Yeah. Okay. We don't want our wrist to damage the patient. Yes. So. Especially on the eyeball. Yeah. Because it's not heavy, it's sort of holding its own, unless you're having the weight. Exactly. It's holding its own weight. That's exactly the idea of co-manipulation. Shamsa, could you please stop it please? Thank you. So this is a co-bot, so it's designed to work with humans. Exactly. Brilliant. Thanks to the programming we do, we basically measure how much torque and forces are applied to the robot so that the robot knows how we are interacting with them. Brilliant. And the robot knows where we want to go and it sort of helps us in going there by compensating its own weight. Great. Yeah, right at the eye at the moment. Yeah, exactly. So now in the real surgery, we would be inserting surgical tool. I thought you were going to do that to me? Yeah, you can do it. You can help me. So you can pull this trigger towards the patient. This way? Yeah. Okay. And it slots in. Yeah. And this one will slot in. Right. So now essentially the surgeon would be sitting at the console and looking through the microscope image like an inside man inside the eye and basically driving the surgical tool to perform the injections around the macula rather than other therapies that are required. Brilliant. And so by using this robot and by using the microscope, you can just make tiny, tiny incisions and I suppose tiny surgery onto and which is so important onto the eyeball, right? Right. We can reach the retina. We could potentially even reach behind the eye. We can do basically so many more things that the human hands because of tremors, because of a lot of other inconsistencies that humans have. Absolutely. We're imperfect, right? We're humans. And also like the classic tool is for manual eye surgery is straight. Yeah. While we have the possibility to actually make them curved. I've been touching your computer. Sorry. I hope I'm not. Oh, no, no, that's fine. Don't worry. So I removed the tool. I can show you the tool. But the tools are curved and according to how we control them, we can achieve different positions which allows us the flexibility that the human with the manual tools don't have. That is incredible. Oh, Colin, we are going to have a lot of fun here. Roma, I have definitely got my hands full. I'm going to get to work. But for the meantime, it's back to you. Okay. So let's have a go. Yeah. Thank you Fran. Now here to tell us more about this continuum micro robot. We have Ross Henry. Hi, Ross. Hey, how are you doing? I am good. I hear you've been busy with lots of students downstairs. Yeah, they've been great. So they are very interested in this. That's brilliant. Tell me a little bit about your research and the work you're doing. So what we're doing is it's a collaboration between Kings Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL and we're trying to treat a number of different blind diseases causing blindness. So one of them is macular degeneration. Basically what this would do if I'm looking at you, I'd be able to see the periphery around me but I wouldn't be able to see you. It's like the second largest cause of blindness in the world. Maybe coming up on first soon. But so there's this innovative treatment. So we small patch that we can just put behind the retina. So the back of your eye. However, the issue is we're looking to go somewhere that's about half the size of human hair. So that's really hard for surgeons to work on. This is inside the eyeball, isn't it? The retina is kind of the back surface of the eyeball, isn't it? Yeah. So it'll be the very backside. Right. So it's super safe. We end up, surgeons do, it's called vitoretinal surgery. Stunned, there's probably like 40 cases a day of different types of it that's happening of this group of surgery that's happening at Moorfields every single day. Probably a lot more. But we're trying to innovate and make it better. And the way we'll do that is so with this wee robot here. And what this is, as you said, it's continuum. So it's essentially these pre-bent tubes which nest inside each other. We can either rotate them or translate them back and forth. Okay. And with that, we can create like this snake-like pattern. So the differences in surgery these days, they just use a straight tool. But with this, it means we can access so many more areas of the eye. Okay. And then depending on like the device we use, we can increase the accuracy or like remove tremors and stuff like that. Right. So basically we're talking about being operated on by a robot. Yeah. I mean, to be honest, having surgery in the inside of my eye makes me feel queasy anyway. Yeah. But then the idea of a robot doing it. So is it safe? Like what are the things that you're investigating at the moment? So yeah, well like the thing is, as I said, this type of surgery as an inside the eye, super common already. Like it's completely normal. But with this here, we can make it safer than normal surgery. Because what we can do is say if they're, because of course the back of your eye is super sensitive, what we can do is we can remove hand tremors from like, if a surgeon's hand, if they're trying to get to a very specific point. Or even with that we can map it so with like values like a stylus or a pen to control the robot. And what we can do with that is if they move in their space like a centimetre, it only moves a millimetre in the actual eye. So we can amplify their movement. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about that interaction of the surgeon and the robot. What does that look like? So there's two, maybe three, main ways. The first is like as probably as we saw in the video is a haptic device. So this is... So tell me what haptic means for those who don't know. So haptics for that. This is like the system gives some kind of feedback. So like my phone, you know whenever you get a text or something and it vibrates, that's haptics. So there's like a touch response. Exactly. That's exactly what it is. And with our system what we're looking at is actually there's motors in this device. And firstly it can pick up where we actually are in the eye. It can tell the robot where to move. But if the robot starts moving somewhere which isn't safe and the surgeon's going that direction, we can actually apply a force. And so it kind of stops the surgeon from maybe going to an area that might touch the side of the eye or something like that. It just means that we can minimize the system from straying off to somewhere it's not meant to. Ross, is it using this kind of technique a little bit like almost shrinking down a surgeon and then sending them inside your body to do a bit of surgery on a scale that you couldn't really imagine? That's a cool way of thinking about it. Yeah, I guess it is. So the tool that we end up using, the main one, it's called a forcep. It's basically like a claw. But what we're doing on this here is we're essentially or like a hand almost. We're putting this here and it goes in and we're able to actually like use that really dexterously to like interact with different parts of the eye like at the back of the retina. So say like if someone's got a detached retina, you can, it's like a surgeon going in and holding it and like almost like sewing the retina back on to the eye. That's pretty much what it is. So yeah, a tiny surgeon inside. It's definitely a good way of describing it. Yeah, I mean it's definitely taking us down to a scale I guess that we hadn't really been able to do. Well like if you think about it, the tools we'll work with is about 300 microns. It's a 0.3 millimeters. The area we're looking to go down to is 50 microns. So that's a 20th of a millimeter. It's so small. Like it's really hard to even fathom something that small. And it's the reason why we use these here like the scaling of the haptic device and things. So we are able to actually get there and work with it properly. How did you come into this field and tell us a little bit about like, I don't know your interest as a child and what was your path to getting into this field of science? I had quite a wavy path getting here. I started off, I saw off back home as a florist in Ireland. So it was great. But I came over to King's to study medicine. And when I was a child I either wanted to be an engineer or a doctor. And I didn't realize that I could do both. So I came here for medicine and at GKT I really enjoyed it, like it was amazing teaching. However the study style just didn't suit me. One of my lecturers was a person called Keval Rhodes. He was teaching imaging. And so I got told, chat to him, he does biomedical engineering. My flatmate was one of his students. So I went there. I talked to him and I transferred course over to the Bachelors of Biomed Eng. And with that, yeah, so I was working through my bachelors and my final year project was with Dr. Christos Burglis. And I absolutely loved the work that I was doing with him. I went to him like a couple of months and I was like, look, I love working with you. I love the team and I love the research. And I'm like, I want to stay on, do a PhD or extend my studies. And he was kind enough. He thought my work was good enough. He offered me a PhD. And so since then I've started my PhD. It's currently part-time because the other half of my time I'm working at Moorfields and we're trying to get the robot into a through-the-quality management process, which is a lot. So you're saying about safety. Yes. We have 150 pages just for one part of the risk assessment. Wow. So every single step that we do is like lined up and everything. So we can make it as safe as we can. I mean, I really love the fact that you were able to bring engineering and medicine together. And I think sometimes we forget that we can actually kind of almost practice medicine as an engineer or a scientist. So you're a great role model for that example. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for joining me, Ross.