Alaa Eldin Abdelaal
Why did you decide to pursue a graduate degree?
Because my goal is to work in research either in academia or industry, and a graduate degree is probably the best thing to do to prepare me to achieve this goal.
Why did you decide to study at UBC?
Because of its reputation as a leading research university. Being in a great city such as Vancouver was also a major factor in my decision to attend UBC.
What is it specifically, that your program offers, that attracted you?
My supervisor, Prof. Septimiu E. Salcudean is a well-known figure in the area of medical robotics. Our lab (The Robotics and Control lab) has three da Vinci Surgical systems (from Intuitive Surgical Inc.); they all have "read" interfaces that allow one to track the positions of the instruments, while one of them has a da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) that enables researchers to hack the system for their own purposes. Only 30 research groups worldwide have access to the dVRK interface, and only four of them are in Canada. The lab also has strong ties with the Vancouver General Hospital (with Drs. Peter Black, Larry Goldenberg and Chris Nguan). This facilitates the observation of real robotic surgeries and getting input from clinicians about my proposed work. Our lab also collaborates with other established groups including Dr. Gregory Hager's group at Johns Hopkins University. This makes it easy to have Dr. Hager as my co-supervisor.
What was the best surprise about UBC or life in Vancouver?
For me, it was how beautiful the campus and Vancouver are.
What aspects of your life or career before now have best prepared you for your UBC graduate program?
I think the main aspect is having a very supportive family. I am indebted to my mother, my father, and my wife for all their encouragement and support. I am also very grateful to all my mentors throughout my life especially Dr. Mohamed Hefeeda and Dr. Tamir Hegazy who were my advisors during my MSc degree which I completed at Simon Fraser University.
What advice do you have for new graduate students?
I advise them to have a clear goal of why they want to pursue a graduate degree, especially a PhD. Another piece of advice is to learn about all the available resources they have during their studies and make use of them to achieve their goal. Last but not least, I advise them to have fun and to make sure that the journey towards a PhD is enriching all aspects of their personal life, not just the professional one.
Learn more about Alaa Eldin 's research
Medical errors are the third cause of death in the United States leading to around 250,000 deaths every year. The limited amount of training time available for residents and the outdated methods currently used for training, give rise to the need for a more efficient training framework to facilitate the acquisition of surgical skills and overcome the medical errors problem. The proposed research addresses this problem in robot-assisted surgeries. In these surgeries, a surgical robot is directly controlled by a surgeon to perform the procedure inside the patient's abdomen. This setup allows us to record valuable surgical data such as the surgeon's movements and eye gaze. We propose using the collected data to improve the training for novice surgeons in robot-assisted surgeries. Analyzing the collected data will enable us to understand what distinguishes experts from novices. Furthermore, this will enable us to understand the underlying principles of surgical skills. This understanding will then be used to develop innovative training methods that will allow experts to remotely transfer their skills to novices. The proposed research has the potential to revolutionize the way surgeons are currently trained. We collaborate with the leading firm producing surgical robots to deploy our training framework into their training facilities. The findings of this research can serve as new guidelines for companies producing surgical robot systems to improve their design to facilitate the acquisition of surgical skills. Beside surgical applications, the developed training methods have the potential of being applied in other areas of robotics such as training persons with disabilities to control their robotic assistance devices.