INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN ASSISTED SURGERY

Computer Aided Surgery is opening new scenarios in medicine aimed to improve the patient’s care by advancing the utilisation of computer into surgical practice which have already provided practical application particularly in orthopaedics and neurosurgery. The recent developments in multimodal 3D medical imaging techniques which are providing with great accuracy and the necessary resolution a clear representation on a multiscale basis of the morphological and functional features of the internal organs and tissues constitute the necessary basis. The interdisciplinary collaboration between engineers and physicians provide new concepts and applications in this field derived from digital modelling and simulation methods for the analysis of complex systems, sensors and motion capture technologies, robotics and mechatronics. Three main phases are described in this paper. The preoperative phase where the information derived from multimodal imaging of each patient is processed by proper mathematical models and simulation techniques to identify the best way to operate (surgical planning). The intraoperative phase where the surgeon is assisted by a “virtual fusion†of the preoperative images of the internal organs of the patients with the effective position of operative instruments recorded by proper trackers. Finally the postoperative phase to evaluate the efficacy of the treatments and the patient’s follow up.