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Health Is Going High Tech WIth Camera Pills, Health Sensors And Ultrasound Maps For Surgeons

ultrasound creating maps of the body: health has become high technology. Here are some of the recent advances in medical technology.3-D Images For Surgeons

For more than ten years, senior medical officer Ronald Mårvik at St. Olav’s Hospital in Trondheim has been collaborating with SINTEF scientist Thomas Langø. Together, they have created a new IT-base window on the inside of the body, a window that makes a patient transparent on a screen when a surgeon inserts operating instruments through small openings in the abdominal wall.

What the system actually does is transform X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance (MR) images into three-dimensional maps by which the surgeon can navigate when he performs keyhole surgery in the abdominal cavity. The technique enable the surgeon to select a more lenient keyhole approach in operations that would otherwise demand large, open interventions. This offers benefits both to the individual patient and to society, because, in comparison with open operations, keyhole surgery puts less stress on the patient’s body. As a result, the patient needs to spend less time in hospital and in reconvalescence.

Like navigation systems for shipping and aviation, this navigation technology has been developed in order to improve safety: the system provides information that enables the surgeon to avoid blood vessels and other organs when he operates via small openings in the abdominal wall.

The maps show the surgeon exactly where a cancerous tumour for example is located, relative to the tip of the instruments inside the patient’s body; and no less important, the location of the tip relative to vital organs and to major blood vessels that absolutely must not be damaged by the surgical intervention.

“With a better view of vital organs and blood vessels, a surgeon can perform keyhole surgery with an extra high margin of safety, and can employ keyhole surgery much more often than before to remove tumours in organs that would not otherwise be easily accessible to keyhole interventions; organs such as the kidneys, the adrenal glands or the pancreas,” explains Thomas Lange.

A hospital in the Netherlands has now purchased the SINTEF software for the system, and doctors from Trondheim and Utrecht will collaborate in documenting the benefits of the technique.