Experts from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory have won the Best Medical Paper award at one of the world’s largest robotics conferences for their pioneering work helping treat fractures.
The team topped the category for their paper, which outlined how robotics can assist surgeons as an aging population means a growing number of fractures.
Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) – a collaborative partnership between the University of the West of England (UWE) and the University of Bristol – is the UK’s most comprehensive academic centre for multi-disciplinary robotics research. Much of that research is centred on the use of robotics in medicine and healthcare.
The BRL team – Dr Sanja Dogramadzi, Dr Ioannis Georgilas, Dr Giulio Dagnino, Prof Roger Atkins and Paul Kohler – collected the award at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2016).
One of the leading international forums for robotics researchers to present their work, ICRA 2016 took place in Stockholm last month with 2,500 delegates in attendance.
Team leader Dr Sanja Dogramadzi said the award was the result of a three-year project funded by the National Institute for Health Research’s invention for innovation (i4i) scheme to create a new system to assist orthopaedic surgeons with fracture management.
“Fracture incidence in the UK is directly linked to the rising ageing population,” she said. “This is a great recognition of our pioneering work in this area.”
The winning paper was called Image based Robotic System for Enhanced Minimally Invasive Intro- Articular Fracture Surgeries.
BRL is home to a vibrant community of more than 200 academics, researchers and industry practitioners – many of them world leaders in current thinking on service robotics, intelligent autonomous systems and bio-engineering.
An internationally recognised centre of excellence in robotics, BRL’s state-of-the-art facilities cover an area of more than 4,600 sq m (50,000 sq ft) at UWE.
