CT scans captured
before and during sur-
gery can be integrated
on big screens to let
surgeons work with
real-time views of
anatomy, even as
structures shift due to
patient positioning or
surgical manipulation.
Dr. Ramamoorthy, for
example, requested
that her team tilt the
3D rendering of Dr.
Smarr's colon on the
big screen so that it
matched the angle she
saw through the robotic control console.
"One of the challenges moving forward will be how to deal with the
potential of information overload," says Dr. Ramamoorthy. While oper-
ating on Dr. Smarr, she glanced up at the wall-mounted big screen and
took a second to zero in on what she needed to see.
"Surgeons now have access to a lot of visual information," she says.
"They need to triage that information, digest it and decide what is
most important in order to make the best possible decisions. That
might require computer-aided, artificially intelligent guidance in the
future."
OSM
A U G U S T 2 0 1 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y. N E T • 1 0 5
UC
San
Diego
Health
• 3D COLON Surgeons can visualize an internal organ as a three-dimensional recon-
struction, as seen in this 3D/MRI overlay of a colon.
