How Can Robotic Surgery Improve Access To Specialized Healthcare in Rural Communities?

This summer, we invite you to explore the experiences and accomplishments of our 2025-2026 Bass Connections project teams. This series features team-written profiles that showcase the discoveries, challenges and impact of teams who spent the year tackling real-world problems.

Imagine living in a rural community far from a large hospital and needing a specialized surgical procedure.

For many living in North Carolina — and in rural communities across the globe — accessing advanced surgical care is a challenge. Patients often face long travel distances, limited specialist availability and delays in treatment. 

The Reimagining Surgery for Rural Needs: Robotics Teleoperation team explored how specialized surgery can be delivered beyond major medical centers in a safe, cost-effective way through a robotic laser surgery platform that can be operated by clinicians across surgical specialties. Team members produced a functioning prototype with physician-informed design insights and preliminary user-study results, demonstrating a path toward safer and more accessible robotic surgical systems for rural care.

This team was led by Leila Bridgeman (Pratt School of Engineering: Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science), Patrick Codd (School of Medicine: Neurosurgery), Brian Mann (Pratt School of Engineering: Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science), Ryan McNabb (School of Medicine: Ophthalmology) and Ravi Prakash (Ph.D. Student, Pratt School of Engineering: Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science)

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By: Members of the Reimagining Surgery for Rural Needs team

Team Goals

Our team had three goals centered on designing a surgical platform for rural use:

First, we aimed to build an integrated teleoperation platform — a platform that allows remote control by a human operator from a distance — for robotic laser surgery, combining robot motion, laser control, live camera feedback and imaging into one surgeon-facing system.

Second, we worked to ground the engineering design in real clinical needs. Through surveys and feedback, the team studied what surgeons value most in robot-guided surgery, including precision, visualization, safety, workflow integration and ease of use.

Third, we aimed to produce tools that could support future research and broader learning, including an open-source robotic laser surgery platform, a clinician-informed user interface, preliminary teleoperation studies and a live dashboard of clinician preferences.

Key Findings

The project produced two major findings: 

1. Clinician needs vary sharply by surgical specialty. Neurosurgeons emphasized the precision of tissue removal, while urologists emphasized maintaining clear field visibility. Across responses, high-resolution visual feedback ranked as the most important desired feature.
2. An integrated robotic laser platform can support precise, image-guided tissue removal through teleoperation.

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Outputs

The project produced several outputs across engineering, clinical research and public engagement. 

We developed an open-source robot-assisted tissue surgery platform that integrates robotic motion, laser control, imaging, live camera feedback, sense-of-touch input and a surgeon-facing user console.

We produced a survey and live dashboard summarizing clinician preferences for robot-guided surgery. The team plans to continue collecting survey responses and publish the findings, with emphasis on how surgical specialty, prior experience and clinical workflow shape the desired features of robotic surgical systems.

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The work contributed to publications and presentations across leading robotics and medical robotics venues, including the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Vienna, Austria), IEEE-RAS RoboSoft 2026 (Kanazawa, Japan), and the International Symposium on Medical Robotics (Knoxville, TN).

Our team is continuing our work through manuscripts on the clinician survey and a clinical user study evaluating the platform for surgical tasks, including usability, task completion and safety-related metrics. Beyond academic outputs, we created outreach material, including the YouTube video below, to introduce broader audiences to robotic laser surgery and its potential role in expanding surgical access.

Team Member Reflections

These reflections have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Ravi Prakash (M.S. ’21, Ph.D. ’26; Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science)

Leading this Bass Connections project was one of the most rewarding experiences at the end of my Ph.D. From writing the project application to working with the Bass Connections and Global Health teams, the project gave me early exposure to grant-style writing, course design, mentorship, grading rubrics and the responsibilities of serving as Instructor of Record.

The most valuable lesson was learning how to lead a diverse, interdisciplinary team. Our students came from neuroscience, computer science, electrical and computer engineering, biomedical engineering, and related fields, each with different skills, goals and levels of technical experience. My goal was to build a structure that gave students meaningful ownership while keeping the team aligned around a shared objective.

This experience helped me grow as a mentor. I learned how to balance guidance with independence and plan work for the team for a year-long expedition. It required me to teach research and engineering skills, and support students in literature review, system design, poster development, presentations and scientific communication. Seeing students grow and propose new ideas and thoughts, whether in clinician surveys, user-interface design or full-system integration, was one of the most satisfying parts of the project.

The project also changed how I think about medical robotics. Engineers often build surgical systems with limited direct input from the surgeons who may one day use them. This team helped address that gap by engaging clinicians across specialties and using their feedback to shape our design priorities. Overall, I am grateful to Bass Connections for enabling a project that connected engineering, medicine, global health and education, while helping me become a better mentor, teacher and translational researcher.

Vincent Wang (B.S. ’22, Ph.D. ’28; Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science)

Though medical technologies are widespread in the clinical space, this project was a really unique angle into how physicians and technologies can work hand-in-hand to address clinical challenges in order to both increase accessibility of healthcare procedures, as well as improve patient outcomes. 

Our survey-based approach to obtaining real, primary source physician opinions on the greatest need for robots in the operating room taught me a lot about the requirements and factors that surgeons consider when deciding what kind of technologies to adopt, which will be of great use to my future work in the medical robotics design space. Using that information, our team did a great job in designing and tuning our teleoperated robotic system to fit clinical needs, resulting in a final product that will enable safer and more efficient robotic teleoperation for physician use in the future.

Yongjun Lu (M.S. ’26; Biomedical Engineering)

I learned a lot from the Bass Connections project, not only about medical automated OCT integration technology, but also about teamwork, leadership and clinical research. I had the chance to help lead the group, learn more about the IRB process and connect with surgeons to hear their perspectives on our innovation. This experience showed me how important it is to combine engineering with real user feedback to create solutions that are practical and impactful for clinicians.

Ariella Rukhlin (B.S. ’28; Neuroscience)

Through this project, I gained experience working at the intersection of healthcare, technology and social science research. I developed skills in analyzing clinician feedback, translating data into actionable insights and collaborating across interdisciplinary teams. This experience reinforced the importance of incorporating human-centered perspectives when designing and implementing new medical technologies.

Karan Gupta (B.S. ’28; Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering)

Being part of this Bass Connections project was a very different experience from most of the work I’ve done before; it gave me the opportunity to work across and design a full system, end to end, instead of just one layer. 

A moment that really stood out was when I first got the simulated arm to track the TouchX input correctly, and then seeing that translate to the real robot moving. That was the culmination of much of my work and crucial to the final system, and very rewarding to see work end-to-end. And of course, having our abstract accepted to the International Symposium on Medical Robotics was super validating, and something I had never even considered as being in the scope of the program.

Overall, this project gave me a ton of new exposure and pushed me to become much more comfortable working across the stack. It also gave me a better understanding of how much coordination is required between software, hardware and control systems to build real world systems for such high-integrity applications.

Shimly Qian (B.S. ’28; Interdepartmental Major in Neuroscience and Computer Science)

This project has provided me with a valuable opportunity to explore robotics and engineering through both research and real-world applications. Throughout the process, I was introduced to concepts such as teleoperations and user interface design, which are key elements that help surgeons effectively visualize and interact with robotic systems.

Collaborating with my team has been a rewarding experience. I developed a deeper understanding of the challenges surrounding access to medical resources in rural areas, as well as the practical requirements that surgical devices have to meet to better support surgeons. This not only allowed me to further explore the intersection of engineering and biology, but also strengthened my collaboration skills within a research environment. I am grateful to Bass Connections for providing me with this meaningful and enriching experience.

Learn More

• Browse additional news and updates from Bass Connections.
• Explore additional teams in the Global Health theme.
• Learn about the project team experience through stories from students.

Main image: still from video The Future of Brain Surgery: Robots, Lasers & Real-Time Imaging