Prof. Tim Salcudean's student, Alaa Eldin Abdelaal, is the recipient of the 2019 Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships (Vanier CGS). He will receive $50,000 per year for three years of doctoral studies.
Get to know him below:
Brief overview of research
“A multi-modal training by demonstration framework for robot-assisted surgery”
Medical errors are the third cause of death in the United States leading to around 250,000 deaths every year. The limited amount of training time available for residents and the outdated methods currently used for training give rise to the need for a more efficient training framework to facilitate the acquisition of surgical skills and overcome the medical errors problem. The proposed research addresses this problem in robot-assisted surgeries. In these surgeries, a surgical robot is directly controlled by a surgeon to perform the procedure inside the patient's abdomen. This setup allows us to record valuable surgical data such as the surgeon's movements and eye gaze.
We propose using the collected data to improve the training for novice surgeons in robot-assisted surgeries. Analyzing the collected data will enable us to understand what distinguishes experts from novices. Furthermore, this will enable us to understand the underlying principles of the surgical skills. This understanding will then be used to develop innovative training methods that will allow experts to remotely transfer their skills to novices. This will also enable us to automate some surgical sub-tasks to help surgeons in the operating room.
What does it mean to you to have received a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship?
It is a great honor to join the prestigious club of Vanier Scholars. For me, it is all about the recognition at the national level for all the hard work in the last few years. I still remember my first days as a graduate student, hearing about the amazing profiles of Vanier Scholars and dreaming to be one them. It is very exciting that now this dream has become true. It is also a big responsibility because I should strive to keep the momentum going, conduct the highest quality research while continuing to serve the community and improving my leadership skills.
How will the scholarship help you?
It will help me focus more on my research. It will also make it easier to establish collaborations with other leading groups worldwide in my research area. It will also be a reminder for me that maintaining a well-rounded lifestyle that focuses not only on research, but also on leadership and community service always pays off. sometimes way more than one would expect.