Burton Tripathi, PhD, the Head of Visualization for Alcon, R&D in Goleta, and members of his team have enjoyed being mentors for both the UCSB Computer Science and Computer Engineering capstone courses for several years. Alcon is the global leader in eye care with a 70-plus-year heritage and complementary businesses in Surgical and Vision Care. In fact, their student team, Alcon, won first place in the 2020-21 Computer Science final competition. The division of Alcon that is based in Goleta develops digital surgical microscopes to aid ophthalmologists performing eye surgeries. The goal of the Alcon capstone project was to automate robotic control of the ophthalmological surgical camera and to focus the stereoscopic view on a single patient eye by developing a powerful, yet safe, machine-vision-guided algorithm. The Alcon student team proposed something even more complex; creating an algorithm using the Alcon robotics camera, some novel software, and a database of patient eyes, to ensure that surgery would be conducted on the correct patient and the correct eye.
