Wan Kyun Chung, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering,
POSTECH
wkchung@postech.ac.kr
Biography: Dr. Chung received his BS from Seoul National University in 1981, MS from KAIST in 1983 and Ph.D. from KAIST in 1987. He was a visiting professor at the Robotics Institute of CMU in 1988 and visiting scholar at U.C. Berkeley in 1995. Dr. Chung is currently Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Pohang University of Science and Technology from 1987 and he served as provost and Executive Vice President of POSTECH during 2017-2019. He is a Director of the Robotics Center in POSTECH where 15 professors in Robotics area are involved. His Lab has been designated as National Research Laboratory for intelligent Mobile Robot Navigation by KOSEF(Korea Science and Engineering Foundation) since 2003. His major research focuses are: Robust Control of robots, Mobile Robot, BioMedical and Underwater Robotics, with sponsorship by national agencies (Korea Research Foundation , Department of Commerce and Industry) and industries. Dr. Chung received several best paper awards from Samsung HumanTech., best student paper award from IEEE. He has published over 120 journal papers and 250 refereed conference papers. He served as a senior Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics from 2008 to 2013, he is Editor-in-Chief for Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics by Springer and International Editorial board for Advanced Robotics. He is a principal investigator of 2 projects ($2,000,000/year for 5 years and $1,500,000/year for 7 years) funded by government.
Topic title：Corneal Suturing Robot for Corneal Transplantation Surgery
Abstract：Corneal transplantation is a surgical procedure that replaces the patient’s diseased cornea with the corneal graft. In the surgery, sixteen submillimeter-size sutures are generated around the circular-shaped donor cornea. A major challenge in corneal transplantation is generating sutures of uniform shape, where the shape of the sutures need to be changed depending on the patient. In this paper, a corneal suturing robot is described that can produce sutures of the desired shape and high uniformity. The robot appropriately deforms the corneal tissue before inserting the needle to control the suture shape. A simulation method is proposed for the prediction of the generated suture shape. An ex vivo experiment was conducted, and the uniformity of the suture length and depth was compared with the simulation. As a result, the proposed robot was able to generate the sutures with the standard deviation of 108 µm in length and 36 µm in depth. The average absolute error between the simulation and the experiment was 66 µm in length and 15 µm in depth. This is the first paper suggesting a method for controlling the suture shape and quantitatively analyzing it in ophthalmic surgery.
