Grant: Operating Grant

Prostate cancer is the leading incident cancer in Canadian men. A standard treatment of organ confined prostate cancer is prostate removal via open, laparoscopic, or robot assisted surgery. While the long-term prognosis of prostate cancer patients has improved significantly over the past two decades, there are still many cases in which cancer is left behind after surgery. In addition, there are many cases in which the surgery is followed by complications such as impotence and incontinence. Robot-assistance provides improved visualization and dexterity to the surgeon, and has enabled for the vast majority of surgeries in North America to be carried out in a minimally invasive manner, which leads to shorter hospital stays and faster recovery for the patients. However, there remains a lack of guidance tools available to the surgeon for real time, in-field determination of the prostate region anatomy, and for the determination of tumor location, extension and proximity to critical structures such as the nerves responsible for erection. It is the goal of our research to provide such guidance tools in the form of an augmented reality system for robot-assisted prostate surgery. The guidance tools will be based on an ultrasound system that has been developed in our group and demonstrated in preliminary studies, and upon the integration of magnetic resonance imaging with this ultrasound system so that the surgeon can see the magnetic resonance images in correct relationship with the patient during surgery. A cohort of patients will be enrolled and outcome results from image-guided procedures will be compared to historical and current outcomes from conventional procedures. If successful, this research may have a significant impact on the integration of ultrasound imaging and pre-operative imaging into augmented reality systems for robot assisted and other types of surgery.