Chee Chui

I received my B.Sc. (Honors) and M.Sc. (By research) degrees from the National University of Singapore (NUS), and Ph.D. degree from The University of Tokyo, Japan. I am a mechatronic engineer and a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, NUS. I have been with Control and Mechatronics division since I first joined the department as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in 2005. I currently represent the division in the department Academic Affairs Committee. Between June and December 2016, I was a Visiting Researcher in the Advanced Manufacturing Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. I began my R&D career as a software engineer in May 1991.

Research

My technical expertise is in the areas of biomechanics, computational intelligence, computer vision and graphics, image processing and visualization, mechatronics and parallel processing.

I collaborate with clinicians to research and to develop new devices and systems for patient care. Some of these devices have been tested on animals as well as humans in clinical trials.

From virtual reality and physics-based virtual reality to augmented reality, I am an accomplished researcher on medical simulation. My focus on immersive media involves the provision of haptics and visual cues to assist humans in the training of hand-eye coordination, and furthermore, to augment the human hand-eye coordination in a mixed reality environment and intelligence augmentation. We use parallel computing with multi-core CPUs and GPUs to provide the extensive computational power.

If we could develop a precise medical simulation system that includes robotic manipulation, we could devise an accurate patient-specific surgical plan. The pre-operative plan can guide the human operator(s) and the robotic device(s) to perform the tasks, and be modified intra-operatively by the operator(s) safely via advanced man-machine interfaces and shared control mechanism.

I am currently investigating my human and engineered systems research under the framework of intelligent cyber-physical system with applications in modern operating rooms and manufacturing of patient-specific medical devices.

I am also involved in several non-medical related engineering projects, for examples, robot-assisted cable binding systems in collaboration with Sembcorp Marine and cooling control systems for data centers.

I create mathematical models and conduct experiments to study tissue biomechanics and tool-tissue interactions, and to characterize material properties. As well, I develop new algorithms in computer vision, graphics and medical imaging.

Teaching Areas

• Mechatronics and Robotics modules including Advanced Robotics, Microprocessors Applications, Linear Systems/Modern Control Theory, Sensors and Actuators;
• Computer Vision and Imaging, Machine Vision;
• Engineering Design; and
• Topics in Mechatronics including Biomechanical Systems and Modeling, Computer Aided Surgery, Human-Machine Interface, Medical Image Processing and Visualization, Medical Robotics, Medical Simulation.

Education

• PhD The University of Tokyo
• MSc, BSc (Hon) National University of Singapore
• GCE A Level Raffles Junior College

Companies

• Associate Professor National University of Singapore (2015)
• Visiting Researcher National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) (2016 — 2016)
• Assistant Professor National University of Singapore (2007 — 2014)