Aravind Sunil Kumar

I’m an engineer at NVIDIA. My research focuses on 3D scene understanding for surgical environments - spanning surgical robotics, neural rendering, tissue deformation modeling, and spatially-aware perception for image-guided procedures.

I also work on AI agents, building systems for agent-based diagnostics that integrate structured reasoning and multimodal signals.

I have contributed extensively to open-source surgical robotics, with contributions to the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) ecosystem and ROS 2 - 3D Slicer medical imaging integrations.

I have collaborated with Anton Deguet, Axel Krieger, and Simon Leonard on improving ROS 2 and 3D Slicer integration, including work on SlicerROS2, ROS 2 pipelines, and surgical simulation workflows. Earlier, I worked with Dr. Soumyadipta Acharya on vectorCam, a computer-vision project that went on to be featured on Bill Gates’ youtube.

Academically, I completed my Master’s in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, where I worked within the medical robotics community, and my B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering at IIT Madras.

Current Technical Interests

AI agents for diagnostics and structured reasoning
3D scene understanding for surgical environments
Deformable tissue representations and neural rendering
Surgical robotics research infrastructure (ROS 2 / 3D Slicer / Isaac Sim)
Video-based action learning for vision-language-action models

I enjoy collaborating on problems at the intersection of medical robotics, 3D scene understanding, and AI systems, and I’m always happy to connect with researchers or engineers working in these areas.

Updates

SlicerROS2 — Introductory Talk at ROS2 Meetup Bogota, 2025 A technical introduction to bridging 3D Slicer and ROS 2 for robotic surgery research. Watch on YouTube
SlicerROS2 v1.0 Release Documentation and tooling for integrating ROS 2 pipelines into 3D Slicer. V1 Release Documentation
VectorCAM featured on Bill Gates’ Youtube Channel vectorCam featured in a Bill Gates video on scalable global health diagnostics. Watch on YouTube
AI Systems for Diagnostic Analysis - Talk at RECon, Dublin 2025 A talk on AI agent architectures for diagnostic reasoning — integrating structured models with LLMs for diagnosis. Watch on YouTube
MedMachina — Medical Robots Directory https://medmachina.github.io/

selected publications

IEEE T-MRB

SlicerROS2: A Research and Development Module for Image-Guided Robotic Interventions

Laura Connolly, Aravind S. Kumar, Kapi Ketan Mehta, and 9 more authors

IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, Nov 2024

DOI Bib

@article{connolly2024slicerros2,
  title = {{SlicerROS2}: A Research and Development Module for Image-Guided Robotic Interventions},
  author = {Connolly, Laura and Kumar, Aravind S. and Mehta, Kapi Ketan and Al-Zogbi, Lidia and Kazanzides, Peter and Mousavi, Parvin and Fichtinger, Gabor and Krieger, Axel and Tokuda, Junichi and Taylor, Russell H. and Leonard, Simon and Deguet, Anton},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics},
  volume = {6},
  number = {4},
  pages = {1334--1344},
  year = {2024},
  month = nov,
  publisher = {IEEE},
  doi = {10.1109/TMRB.2024.3464683},
}

Sci. Rep.

Towards transforming malaria vector surveillance using VectorBrain: a novel convolutional neural network for mosquito species, sex, and abdomen status identifications

Deming Li, Shruti Hegde, Aravind Sunil Kumar, and 8 more authors

Scientific Reports, Nov 2024

DOI Bib

@article{li2024towards,
  title = {Towards transforming malaria vector surveillance using {VectorBrain}: a novel convolutional neural network for mosquito species, sex, and abdomen status identifications},
  author = {Li, Deming and Hegde, Shruti and Sunil Kumar, Aravind and Zacharias, Atul and Mehta, Parthvi and Mukthineni, Venkat and Srimath, Satwik and Patel, Sunny and Suin, Maitreya and Chellappa, Rama and Acharya, Soumyadipta},
  journal = {Scientific Reports},
  volume = {14},
  number = {1},
  pages = {23647},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {Nature Publishing Group},
  doi = {10.1038/s41598-024-71856-8},
}