DrPhilipPratt

While the use of preoperative imaging for minimally invasive surgical guidance has been successfully translated into the operating theatre, many of the difficulties associated with the reduced sensory experience remain. This approach works well as a roadmap, allowing the surgeon to appreciate the macroscopic anatomy. However, it must be combined with an intraoperative phase designed to account for structural change induced by dissection, and tissue deformation in general. Adopting robotic partial nephrectomy as the exemplar intervention, this programme of research assesses the feasibility of a novel technique for fusing dense stereo scene reconstructions with intracorporeal freehand 3D ultrasound segmentations. In this application, the fact that the resulting geometry can be viewed from any arbitrary position makes it a potentially invaluable aid in the pursuit of optimal nephron sparing resections.