CUHK Research: Changing the world

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 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, We surgeons need to be very humble and accommodating to enhance our interdisciplinary collaboration. Professor Chiu it doesn’t mean you’re helping people. If your robot is not easy to use, they’ll just put it in the garage.” Facing the future The MRC draws on CUHK’s long track record of robotic development and early breakthroughs in minimally invasive surgery. That seed work enabled Professors Chiu and Au to secure HK$470 million in government funding to establish their robotic surgery lab. It also gives the MRC an edge, today, in navigating the rigorous process of obtaining regulatory approval for human and hospital trials. 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. 10