ANALYSIS AND OPINION SMART SURGERY
Photonics-guided robots to transform operating rooms, experts say
Smart surgical tools will significantly improve the accuracy of operations, according to speakers at the European Photonic Industry Consortium’s recent AGM, and photonics will play a key role. Matthew Dale reports
P
hotonics and robotics technologies will be crucial in helping
healthcare authorities around the globe cope with aging populations, experts claimed at this year’s EPIC AGM, held on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven in March. By 2030, it is estimated that half of the global population will suffer from chronic diseases, which will account for 83 per cent of total healthcare spending, said Dr Jacques Souquet, founder of SuperSonic Imagine in his keynote talk, adding that fast, accurate and reliable diagnostics will be crucial for addressing this growing strain on medicine. Other keynote speakers noted
that smart instruments and highly dexterous photonics- guided robots could soon become commonplace in the ‘hybrid operating room’, an environment where surgeons will work alongside real- time imaging technologies to perform highly precise, minimally invasive procedures. Dr Benno Hendriks, a
research fellow at Philips Research, introduced the concept of the hybrid operating room after pointing out similarities between modern surgical procedures and those carried out in the 1950s, where surgeons had to rely on their own eyesight and skill alone, regardless of how many images
14 Electro Optics May 2017
or diagnostic reports they had looked at beforehand. ‘In the past, the practice in
surgery was first to cut, then see, whereas now surgeons are using diagnostics to first see, then cut, guided by their own eyes,’ explained Hendriks in his keynote presentation. ‘Now, the trend is moving towards first seeing, then navigating using a range of sophisticated navigation tools to bring the surgeon to the area being treated, then before treating,
acquiring feedback on what is being done, and then finally performing minimally invasive cutting.’ According to Hendriks, imaging equipment is now not only used in the diagnostic phase, but is also being brought into surgeries themselves. ‘This allows surgeons to see, analyse and navigate tissue, meaning they can then perform these minimal cuts,’ he commented. Real-time solutions are
already being used to assist certain surgical procedures – for example to guide doctors inserting catheters through blood vessels to treat heart conditions. This provides the surgeon with multiple perspectives of the operation in real time to ensure maximum surgical precision. Existing technologies, such as endoscopy, will aid the
development of hybrid operating rooms, said Hendriks, but there is a need for new instruments that can enable tissue tracking. ‘It’s not just enough to know the movements of the body, but also the movements of the components inside the body.’ Hendriks added that when using catheters, doctors can ‘follow the blood vessels like roads.’ However, performing surgery outside of the blood vessels can be difficult, as the surgeon has to go ‘off-road.’ The solution to this lies
in the development of smart instruments that can ‘read tissues with light’, according to Hendriks. A ‘smart’ biopsy needle with an integrated spectrometer was shown as a way of targeting specific lesions inside the body. ‘The instrument uses a light source
Benno Hendriks, research fellow at Philips Research, gives his keynote speech at EPIC’s AGM at the end of March @electrooptics |
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