Med-Tech Innovation University News
Leeds keeps surgeons in touch
Computer Aided Design
CNC Tooling
Controlled Environment
A team of engineering undergraduates at the University of Leeds has developed a system to provide cancer surgeons with an important way of double- checking where the tumour is and if it is malignant or benign. Currently, surgeons using keyhole procedures cannot feel the tissue they are operating on, which means they are unable to tell the character of a lump. The Leeds’ system combines computer virtualisation and a hand-held device that simulates pressure to the surgeon’s hand when touching human tissue remotely. Team members set up the system to simulate keyhole surgery on the liver. They gathered measurements from a soft block of silicon to simulate what surgeons would “feel” during keyhole procedures and fed these into the hand-held device. They tested the system by embedding hard ball bearings in the artificial, silicon liver and checking whether users could find them. “This system might help surgeons to become more accurate in theatre,” said University of Leeds engineering student, Earle Jamieson. “Haptic devices that give users sensory feedback are becoming more common in surgery, but none of them quite match that true hands-on feeling. With our system, users can interact with the tissue they are operating on throughout the surgical procedure.” Dr Peter Culmer, a Senior Translational Research
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06 ¦ November/December 2011
www.med-techinnovation.com
Fellow in Surgical Technologies, who supervised the work, said, “Judging from the feedback the students have received from practising surgeons, this system has real, clinical potential. In the short-term, it could be used as a training tool to help surgeons get a feel for keyhole surgery – quite literally. Looking further ahead, systems such as this could become used in operating theatres on a daily basis.”
www.leeds.ac.uk
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