Urology Projects
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This project aims at developing advanced methods for robotic image acquisitions, enabling more flexible, patient- and process-specific functional and anatomical imaging with the operating theater. Using robotic manipulations, co-registered and dynamic imaging can be provided to the surgeon, allowing for optimal implementation of preoperative planning. In particular, this projects is the first one developing concepts for intraoperative SPECT-CT, and introduces intraoperative robotic Ultrasound imaging based on CT trajectory planning, enabling registration with angiographic data. With distinguished partners from Bavarian industry, this project has a fundamental contribution in developing safe, reliable, flexible, and multi-modal imaging technologies for the operating room of the future.
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EDEN2020 (Enhanced Delivery Ecosystem for Neurosurgery) aims to develop the gold standard for one-stop diagnosis and treatment of brain disease by delivering an integrated technology platform for minimally invasive neurosurgery. A team of first-class industrial partners (Renishaw plc. and XoGraph ltd.), leading clinical oncological neurosurgery team (Università di Milano, San Raffaele and Politecnico di Milano) lead by Prof. Lorenzo Bello and the involvement of leading experts in shape sensing (Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen) under supervision of Prof. Dr. Sarthak Misra The project is coordinated by Dr. Rodriguez y Baena, Imperial College London. His team provides the core technology for the envisioned system, the bendable robotic needle. During the course of EDEN2020 this interdisciplinary team will work on the integration of 5 key concepts, namely (1) pre-operative MRI and diffusion-MRI imaging, (2) intra-operative ultrasounds, (3) robotic assisted catheter steering, (4) brain diffusion modelling, and (5) a robotics assisted neurosurgical robotic product (the Neuromate), into a pre-commercial prototype which meets the pressing demand for better and less invasive neurosurgery. Our chair will be focusing on the imaging components (i.e. (1) and (2)), targeting the realtime compensation of tissue movement and accurate localization of the flexible catheters at hand. We will further extend the findings of FP7 ACTIVE, in which we successfully combined pre-operative MRI with intra-operative US through deformable 3D-2D registration, making us most qualified for this role.
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Transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) guided biopsy remains the gold standard for diagnosis. However, it suffers from low sensitivity, leading to an elevated rate of false negative results. On the other hand, the recent advent of PET imaging using a novel dedicated radiotracer, Ga-labelled PSMA (Prostate Specific Membrane Antigen), combined with MR provides improved preinterventional identification of suspicious areas. Thus, MRI/TRUS fusion image-guided biopsy has evolved to be the method of choice to circumvent the limitations of TRUS-only biopsy. We propose a multimodal fusion image-guided biopsy framework that combines PET-MRI images with TRUS. Based on open-source software libraries, it is low cost, simple to use and has minimal overhead in clinical workflow. It is ideal as a research platform for the implementation and rapid bench to bedside translation of new image registration and visualization approaches.
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