Duke team builds teleoperated robotic laser surgery prototype for rural care

This is a summary of a story on Bass Connections.

For patients in rural communities, accessing specialized surgical care often requires traveling long distances to major medical centers, which delays treatment and increases healthcare burdens.

To address this, a team from Bass Connections launched the Reimagining Surgery for Rural Needs: Robotics Teleoperation project, an interdisciplinary initiative to expand access to advanced surgical care through robotic technology for those living in rural areas.

The program examined remote robotic surgery via teleoperation, allowing surgeons to control robotic systems remotely while receiving live visual and imaging feedback.

The team wanted to determine whether specialized surgical expertise could be delivered outside major hospitals while remaining safe, effective and affordable. To tackle the challenge, students worked with faculty and researchers from the School of Medicine and Pratt School of Engineering to create a solution.

The project had three key objectives: build an integrated robotic laser surgery platform, design the technology around the needs of practicing clinicians, and create open-source tools to support future research and innovation.

To ensure the system met real-world clinical demands, the team surveyed physicians across multiple specialties to identify which features they valued most in robot-assisted surgery.

Their findings? Surgical priorities vary significantly by specialty. Neurosurgeons emphasized precise tissue removal, whereas urologists prioritized maintaining visibility throughout procedures. Despite these differences, physicians consistently identified high-resolution visual feedback as the most important feature of robotic surgical systems. The team also showed that an integrated robotic platform can perform precise, image-guided tissue removal via teleoperation.

With support from the Duke Brain Tool Lab,  Bass Connections project produced a robotic surgery prototype that integrates robotic motion, laser control, imaging, live camera feedback, touch-based controls and a surgeon-facing interface. The Brain Tool Lab, a collaboration between the Department of Neurosurgery and Pratt, has been working on surgical robotics since 2015.

Their work showed how physician-developed robotic technologies could bring specialized surgical expertise to underserved rural communities.

To learn more about the project and read about the students’ experiences, visit Bass Connections.