Shun Hing Education and Charity Fund Professor of Robotic Surgery
Translating medical and engineering knowledge into healthcare technologies that directly benefit patients is a key pursuit and core strength of CUHK. Its Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center (MRC) is a trailblazer in bringing the worlds of medicine and engineering together. In collaboration with other world-leading institutes – plus visionary commercial partners – the MRC is further advancing minimally invasive, high precision surgical robotic technologies. It is also incubating affordable medical robots as pressure mounts for better patient care in hospitals in Hong Kong, the mainland and world.
A synergistic circuit
Within a 15-minute drive in Hong Kong’s New Territories is a med-tech ecosystem that is hard to match. It integrates CUHK’s on-campus medical and engineering faculties, the medical faculty’s Prince of Wales teaching hospital, the CUHK Medical Centre and, since 2020, the 12,000 square feet Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center (MRC) at the Hong Kong Science Park. Together, they cover a spectrum from basic research to prototype and product development, to pre-clinical trials and physician training, to clinical application in hospitals.
“It’s a total pathway for how we translate these technologies from bench to bedside,” says CUHK Department of Surgery Professor Philip Chiu Wai-yan, Co-Director of the MRC. “CUHK was the first to introduce robotic surgery in Hong Kong. But then we needed to partner with expert engineers who could take robotic technologies from concept to product.” Also needed was a robotic platform for pre-clinical testing, practice and training. “Our centre is the missing piece between driving surgical robotics technology forward and applying it clinically,” he says.
Professor Samuel Au Kwok-wai of CUHK’s Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, and the MRC’s other Co-Director, explains why engineers, too, needed such a platform. “Beyond just talking, it allows surgeons to explain animal or cadaver anatomy more effectively to engineers, so that engineers can develop hardware that is safe, effective and easy for surgeons to use.”
A collaborative culture
The MRC’s hybrid operating room is a floodlit futurescape of intra-operational imaging monitors, streamlined control consoles and next generation robotic surgical arms. One of its kind in Asia, it bustles with the comings and goings of more than 70 researchers and practitioners, including 20 to 30 engineers and up to 20 surgeons from CUHK’s Department of Surgery. It currently supports research programmes for three types of robotic platforms and robotic interventions at different scales, including micro and nano.
“The MRC is part of the collective efforts of our collaborators including three topnotch overseas universities,” notes Professor Chiu. These are ETH Zurich, Imperial College London, and Johns Hopkins University. The centre is also wide open to innovative collaborations with other partners in Hong Kong, the mainland and overseas.
Shared dreams
Professor Chiu and Professor Au, both CUHK graduates, each had a dream to take cutting-edge medical technology from basic research to clinical practice in ways that benefit patients.
Their dreams converged in 2016 when Professor Chiu, founding Director of CUHK’s milestone Chow Yuk Ho Technology Centre for Innovative Medicine, was searching for a like-minded engineer partner with whom he could forge new ways to translate biomedical engineering research innovations into medical practices. “We knew Sam and his outstanding work in the US through the alumni network,” says Professor Chiu.
For Professor Au, the CUHK community’s embrace of interdisciplinary research was an attraction. “It’s the foundation to build medical robotics because we need a lot of people from different specialties to work together. I felt that CUHK was the place where I could explore the future.” Returning to Hong Kong and CUHK in 2016, he became Co-Director with Professor Chiu of the Chow Yuk Ho Centre.
Team dynamics
“We surgeons need to be very humble and accommodating to enhance our interdisciplinary collaboration.”
— Professor Philip Chiu
For such interdisciplinary initiatives to work, collegial dynamics are all important: “I find the surgeons at CUHK very humble and open to working with engineers,” says Professor Au. Professor Chiu reinforces the point: “We surgeons need to be very humble and accommodating to enhance our interdisciplinary collaboration,” he says. “If a surgeon is arrogant and scolds an engineer, there’ll be no more collaboration and we’ll not bring the technology forward.”
Currently in pre-clinical testing at the MRC is a magnetic-guided nano robot for evacuating clots in stroke patients or those with extreme heart disease. Along with Professor Au’s image-guided robot – the most complicated yet to be built in Hong Kong – Professor Chiu expects major achievements from clinical translation of these breakthroughs over the next five to 10 years.
“The metric for how much we actually contribute to society is not how many robots we sell, but how many procedures are performed with the robot,” says Professor Au. “Just because you sell a robot to a hospital, it doesn’t mean you’re helping people. If your robot is not easy to use, they’ll just put it in the garage.”
From an engineering perspective, says Professor Au, one possible future direction is to develop surgical robots with artificial intelligence and the ability to learn. “We would like to apply AI to optimise some tasks and make surgery more efficient,” he says.
