  Innovations from surgical robotic research rarely translates to live surgery
due to the significant difference between the lab and a live environment. Live
environments require considerations that are often overlooked during early
stages of research such as surgical staff, surgical procedure, and the
challenges of working with live tissue. One such example is the da Vinci
Research Kit (dVRK) which is used by over 40 robotics research groups and
represents an open-sourced version of the da Vinci Surgical System. Despite
dVRK being available for nearly a decade and the ideal candidate for
translating research to practice on over 5,000 da Vinci Systems used in
hospitals around the world, not one live surgery has been conducted with it. In
this paper, we address the challenges, considerations, and solutions for
translating surgical robotic research from bench-to-bedside. This is explained
from the perspective of a remote telesurgery scenario where motion scaling
solutions previously experimented in a lab setting are translated to a live pig
surgery. This study presents results from the first ever use of a dVRK in a
live animal and discusses how the surgical robotics community can approach
translating their research to practice.
