“Robotic Cochlear Surgery: Towards the Realm of Certainty” is the title of Stefan Weber’s keynote speech at this year’s Closing and Award Ceremony of the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics, 29 July 2021. The CASCINATION CEO highlights the development of the world’s first surgical robot for task-autonomous, micro-invasive cochlear implantation. The second keynote will be delivered by Prof. Jacques Marescaux, founding president of the research institute against digestive cancer (IRCAD) and founder of the Hospital-University Institute (IHU) of Strasbourg (France).

HEARO® is a surgical robot system configured for microscale precision 'at the scale of a human hair'. The micro-invasive approach to Robotic Cochlear Implantation is a two stage process. OTOPLAN® visualizes the patient-specific anatomy in 3D to enable pre-planning of manual and robotically-assisted surgical procedures 'before the first cut'. Post-operatively OTOPLAN has powerful functions to verify and report surgical outcomes.

Based on the surgeon’s planning the HEARO® system task-autonomously creates a pinhole access from the surface of the skull directly to the inner ear (the cochlea). The power of the HEARO® procedure is a micro-invasive, Robotic Cochlear Implantation approach designed to deliver more consistent surgical outcomes by overcoming the human limitations of manual surgery. HEARO, the world’s first robot for cochlear implantation, has been developed by CASCINATION and MED-EL and is in first use in hospitals in Europe.

The Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics at the Imperial College in London (UK) is the leading medical robotics event attended by an international audience of over 600 delegates with clinical, scientific and engineering expertise. The symposium has gained a prominent reputation for presentations, discussion and demonstrations of cutting-edge clinical practice and emerging technologies in robotic surgery.