Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

<p>The equipment requested will support a wide range of translational science and engineering research in the theme of advanced computational surgical navigation.<br /> <br /> Computational surgical navigation systems brought major advances to many areas of surgery during the past decade. Contemporary surgical navigation systems depend on pre- and intra-operative imaging information in guiding the procedure. Still, there are significant challenges in surgery. Cancer surgeries often fail because of incomplete tumor resections and/or excessive damage to normal tissues. Another common issue is that contamination of tissues often causes postoperative infection. Our research facility has a revolutionary novel technique to address these issues.<br /> <br /> We propose to create NaviKnife, by integrating spatial navigation and ultrasound imaging techniques with the iKnife device. iKnife performs mass spectrometry analysis on the smoke vented out by the electrosurgery cautery device during surgery. iKnife has been used successfully in the detection of spectra for a wide variety of tissue types including brain, colon, breast, liver and microorganisms. iKnife is capable of yielding an accurate MS analysis from 0.1 cubic mm of tissue within 2 seconds.<br /> <br /> NaviKnife will allow recording and rendering real-time pathological and bacteriological information in 3D space, relative to a patient&rsquo;s anatomy, superimposed on pre-operative and intra-operative ultrasound imagery, for both improved patient care, as well as an exceptional research tool. Queen&rsquo;s is considered an international leader in computational surgical navigation research. The NaviKnife research platform holds strong potential to significantly improve contemporary practice in several surgical specialties and lead to paradigm changes in areas in which the applicants are internationally acknowledged experts.<br /> <br /> Queen&rsquo;s is a world leader in developing open source image-guided intervention research software and systems and our SlicerIGT (www.SlicerIGT.org) system is used by hundreds of research groups on five continents. Dr. Fichtinger will lead the efforts in integrating the SlicerIGT computational surgical navigation research platform with the iKnife device, to develop the NaviKnife surgical navigation research platform for use by the applicant team.</p>