Grant: Collaborative Research and Training Experience

The upcoming revolution in intelligent, image-guided mechatronic technology for surgery and therapy will lead to major benefits to the healthcare system with potential for significant commercial gain. The proposed CREATE program on Computer-Assisted Medical Interventions (CAMI) is motivated by the fact that the research required to develop the next generation of technologies for medical interventions is highly multidisciplinary, requiring not only a deep understanding of clinical applications, but also significant expertise in a wide range of areas such as mechatronics, engineering design, medical robotics, medical imaging, biomechanics, haptics and human-machine interaction, visualization and virtual-reality based simulations. The key objective of the CAMI program is to develop and implement a unique transdisciplinary research and training environment in which a group of top researchers with diverse expertise will collaborate to train the next generation of researchers in interventional technologies and techniques for surgery and therapy. The CAMI program is innovative in that it will result in a unique transdisciplinary ""hands-on"" clinically-motivated research and training environment that will be very different from that currently available at other universities and research organizations in Canada. This environment will therefore enable trainees to acquire skills that are not obtainable elsewhere in the country. The expertise of the investigators and the world-class facilities available for the CAMI program will enable trainees to acquire real-world experience in sensor based state-of-the-art image-guided mechatronic systems for surgery and therapy, medical imaging, and in developing practical solutions to utilize them effectively. The individual disciplines that constitute CAMI are in themselves areas of intense research; however, individually they fall short when training experts in the broad transdisciplinary area of CAMI. We strongly believe that it is only through a research and training program such as the one proposed here that trainees will be able to acquire expertise in all of the key areas needed to enable Canada to be a world leader in technology development for medical interventions.