Yuan Tian

Yuan Tian received a Bachelor of Engineering in Automation from Zhengzhou University, Henan, China, and a Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University, Durham, NC. His research interest is optical coherence tomography (OCT) guided medical robots. His recent work is about OCT-guided robotic deep anterior lamellar keratoplasty (DALK), a corneal transplant surgery. For the image processing part, to correct the cornea and surgical needle light refraction in 3D OCT volumes during corneal surgery, he proposed an algorithm to estimate the corneal phase index based on the readily measured group index. He also developed a method to quantitatively evaluate the refraction correction results on the DALK needle. For the robotics part, he invented a calibration algorithm to optimize the transformation matrices from the robot base frame to the OCT scanner frame, and the robot end effector frame to the needle tip frame simultaneously. His current research is on robotically aligned OCT (RAOCT), which attaches the OCT scanner at the end effector of the robot. He is developing a system using RAOCT to track cells in the human eye’s anterior chamber to improve anterior chamber related disease diagnoses.