Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
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both the ASC and office settings. User-friendly advances I've used every generation of image-guided technology, so I have per- spective on the innovations that make a difference on the day of sur- gery. System footprints are getting smaller — which is a major plus for saving valuable real estate in procedure areas — and the mobility of the units has improved markedly in recent years. Touchscreen interfaces have also made set-up and usability more user-friendly. Circulating nurses and the entire surgical team can easily grasp newer software platforms. If they can't, most of the vendors will provide on- site training for your staff to quickly get up to speed with the use of the technology. Before surgery, patients must have a pre-op CT scan that's formatted for interpretation by the image-guidance software's navigator. It's a seamless process that's coordinated between a hospital's radiology department, ambulatory imaging center or operators of an on-site CT scanner. Typically, the radiology staff burns patient data onto a disk (or perhaps saves it to a USB drive) for transfer to the imaging com- puter's 3D navigator. At some point in the future patient data might be seamlessly integrated into the image-guidance system, but that tech- nology is not yet available. Inputting the patient's data and setting up the system does not add significant steps or time to the typical room turnover. Nurses load the images onto the 3D image-guided system and the surgeon performs a pre-op calibration of the instruments that takes approximately 1 minute to complete. He calibrates the instruments to points on the patient's actual face, nose and sinuses. During the brief "teaching ses- sion," the computer learns the locations of the structures and cali- brates them to the 3D images captured in the pre-op CT scan. 1 1 2 O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5