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Dr. Ka-Wai Kwok becomes the recipient of Early Career Awards 2015/16 offered by Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong. It recognises his work focusing on developing robotic catheterization system to improve the outcomes of therapeutic cardiac electrophysiology (EP) interventions which is an effective treatment to heart rhythm disorders. The proposed robot will be capable to operate inside the bore of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Combined with the enhanced procedural monitoring of radio-frequency ablation (RFA) under MRI, the robot-assisted control of catheter will improve the safety, accuracy and effectiveness of the intervention. It will differ fundamentally from existing remotely-controlled robotic systems, of which the catheter navigation and RFA is still challenging due to very limited image guidance in real time. It will be the first of its kind that provides a means of integrating both intra-operative MR images and MR-based tracking to improve the performance of tele-operated robotic catheterization. This success will potentially open a new dimension for other types of procedures, such as prostate intervention, breast biopsy and stereotactic neurosurgery that can benefit from intra-operative MRI. Apart from the research goal, Dr. Kwok is very keen on sharing R&D experiences with students who are interests in translating engineering knowledge into real clinical practices.

Cardiac electrophysiology (EP) intervention is an effective treatment to heart rhythm disorders. A long catheter has to be delivered to the heart chamber, in which radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is performed on lesion tissue to isolate the abnormal electrophysiological signals that cause arrhythmias.

The overall goal of this project is to develop and validate an MR-conditional robotic catheterization system that integrates intra-op magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), multiple sensing units, enhanced visual and haptic guidance with catheter manipulation to improve the outcomes of therapeutic cardiac EP interventions.

Novel reconfigurable computing architecture will be proposed to resolve the computational bottleneck in real-time image registration. MR-based active tracking of catheter will be applied. The frequently-updated roadmap, along with the catheter data, will be used to provide real-time visual feedback. The robot-assisted control of catheter, combined with the enhanced procedural monitoring of RFA under MRI will improve the safety, accuracy and effectiveness of surgery. The proposed system will differ fundamentally from existing remotely-controlled EP systems, of which the robotic manipulation is still challenging due to the very limited image guidance. It will be the first system that provides a means of integrating intra-op MRI imaging and tracking to improve the performance of tele-operated robotic catheterization.

Dr. Ka-Wai Kwok received the B.Eng and M.Phil degrees from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and then completed his PhD training in The Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London in 2011, where he continued research on surgical robotics as a postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Kwok is also the recipient of the Croucher Foundation Fellowship 2013-14, which supported his research jointly hosted by The University of Georgia, and Brigham and Women's Hospital - Harvard Medical School. His research interests focus on surgical robotics, intra-operative medical image processing, and their uses of high-performance computing techniques. His work has yielded several awards from IEEE international conferences: FCCM’11, IROS’13, ICRA’14. Apart from academic research, Dr. Kwok is also keen on teaching and sharing study experiences with students. He obtained Excellent Tutor Award sequentially in two years whilst pursuing his postgraduate study in CUHK.