The Exploitation of Results

Scientific research should be able to impact people life and be moved from laboratory experiments to real products. In the case of medical devices, this process is called translational research and it is particularly difficult because of the long and expensive process necessary to validate the technology and acquire all the necessary safety certifications. This chapter describes the efforts motivated by the ARS project to transform some of the research results into commercial product, thanks to funding from the European Union. Since a full autonomous surgical robot is a distant goal, we focused on the smaller and reachable goal of percutaneous interventions. Section 2 describes the project PROST that developed a prototype of semi-autonomous robot to support the execution of biopsy for the diagnosis of prostate cancer. Section 3 describes the PROCT project, that aims at demonstrating the feasibility of using Optical Coherence Tomography to replace the physical prostate biopsy with 3D pictures of suspicious areas. Section 4 describes the PROFTH project, which addresses the issues related to focal therapy of prostate cancer, and develops a planner to safely carry out the ablation of early-stage prostate cancer. Finally, Sect. 5 describes the ROBIOPSY project, which aims at moving the PROST prototype closer to market by developing a certifiable medical device for prostate biopsy