				Engineering for the Life Sciences Department of Engineering

3D laprascope for keyhole surgery

When keyhole surgery is being performed for routine abdominal operations such as hernia repair, then three small incisions are made: one for the laprascope rod so that the surgeon can see what is going on, and two for the surgical tools. The abdomen is inflated using carbon dioxide to give the surgeon enough space in which to operate. This type of remote surgical procedure is performed safely, but rather slowly because the surgeons have to operate by vision alone and they have no sense of 'feel' which normally plays a large part in the proceedings.

We cannot as yet supply the sense of touch, but we are working on improving the vision for surgeons doing this type of operation. In particular, we can give them a coloured three dimensional image of the internal organs they are working on. We have already developed suitable optics for such an approach and have proved that our procedure, which is relatively simple does work. In order to advance this to a working product we initially need to combine it with a high frame rate CCD to develop a working prototype which could then be used in clinical trials.

The main benefit would be to allow surgeons to operate more efficiently as more information is available.

Contact: Dr Adrian Travis, email: arlt1 at eng.cam.ac.uk, tel: +44 1223 332735

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