Medical Field

Computer technology has opened up a whole new world for surgeons and patients. Computer-assisted surgeries can be categorized in a myriad of ways and include medical image processing and visualization, such as CT, MRI, ultrasound or angiography; surgical simulation which uses medical image information for optimizing the surgical procedure; and surgical navigation that provides image registration between pre- and intraoperative images, and organ deformation analysis. Surgical navigation also offers the surgical team with images of a patient in surgery and includes endoscope, ultrasonography, interventional CT/MRI, and surgical stereoscopic displays.

Computers can assist in the overall treatment of a patient by limiting the amount of surgical time required in the operating room, monitoring the anesthesia, allow for less invasive surgery, and decrease the amount of time spent of hospitalization and decreases the overall costs of care. In education, computers are used as support technology in the area of decision-making in surgeries and provides support training of surgical skills. However, computers in surgery will never replace the importance of the surgeon's own decision-making process.

CAS is available to support the surgeons, not replace them. CAS is among the fields of virtual reality application. In recent years, research in virtual reality in surgical procedures, including stereoscopic display, force-feedback and human-machine interface are extremely important in CAS research. The computer-assisted minimally invasive surgery project or CAMIS, which began in September 1994 and was completed in June 2000, integrated CAS with magnetic resonance imaging or computerized tomography and non-invasive real time imaging, such as 3-D ultrasound.

The goal of this project was to improve surgical precision and patient outcomes by enabling surgeons to obtain accurate 3-D images of internal surgical fields before and during surgery. The $10 million funding was received from Congress through the office of the Air Force Surgeon General and provided valuable information on interventional breast and other biopsies, orthopedic surgeries, craniofacial reconstruction, and endoscopic surgery. CAMIS proved valuable technical and economic benefits in its use. Total hospital stays and health care costs for craniotomy surgeries were reduced by 20%. Savings to the U.S.

public of $27 billion annually in health care costs have been estimated. The system is now used in the surgery and neurosurgery division at the Cleveland Clinic. Computers and virtual reality are fast becoming standard operating procedures, said an MSNBC health report this year. Physicians are virtually flying through colons to detect cancerous polyps; surgeons are simulating the repair of gunshot wounds with virtual patients; robots are taking over during hip replacement surgeries; and physicians are eliminating tumors without making a single incision in the skin.

Most of these technologies bring together endoscopic surgery, computer imaging, electronic databases and communication networks, all at the surgeon's fingertips. Currently, 600,000 gall bladder surgeries are performed in the U.S. each year, with 95% of them being completed endoscopically. About 95,000 people are diagnosed with colorectal cancer each year. Early diagnosis of this disease means the difference between life and death. Traditionally, physicians diagnosed colorectal cancer in an uncomfortable and painful procedure that took 25-minutes.

Many people who fear the pain and discomfort put off having the procedure done until it is too late. Now physicians can utilize new computerized scanners to search for cancerous polyps throughout the entire colon that takes no longer than 30.