CARS Preview 2018

many of them don’t see the whole reality of surgery. It’s interesting you say that because at last CARS I interviewed Nassir Navab and he said something in that line . He said: “ Having surgeons in the loop and also industry is absolutely necessary ”. I think I remember he also tells the young scientists in his team to go and talk to surgeons, so they know what is needed before they even start to work on their algorithms. Do you agree with that? Yes, absolutely, but the sad thing about that is it should be a given, right? The question for me is not should they talk to surgeons; the question is how much should they talk to surgeons and how much time should they actually spend in the operating room? Do you have an answer? Yeah, way more than they do now! [ laughs ] I think the exchange between surgeons and tech people should be more structured and better prepared. Have a focused, short selection of procedures they should observe, and maybe have a preparatory introduction to the operative field. What kind of environment are we talking about? What types of surgery? More prepared knowledge in advance in order to take full advantage of their clinical stay. Another subject you are going to be talking about is augmented reality - can you tell us more about that? Augmented reality is one of our use cases. We chose augmented reality for one major reason - it’s a new visualization technique. It’s not new outside surgery but it’s definitely new inside surgery, and as with many other reality technologies, it has not been designed for surgery in the first place and you have to keep that in mind. We do a profound clinical evaluation of the technique and we are specifically focusing on the visual part, so what kind of visualization is most helpful for surgeons? Also, what pitfalls could you face if you apply it, for example, intraoperatively in routine procedures, compared to what we use now? Now we are mainly using neuronavigation, which is also a form of visualization, but it’s not applied directly onto the surgical field. Augmented reality will give you that option to do whatever you do using the surgical microscope but see everything you need to see as a virtual overlay over your field. We’re trying to improve that visually and also maybe come up with technical suggestions how to improve. Talking of neurosurgery, is there something you have learnt about the brain the average person wouldn’t know? Wow. That’s a tough one. I personally learned how much knowledge could be applied to surgical approaches from research and technology insights. To give you an example, we have a high- tech environment for brain surgery - we have navigational devices, we have intraoperative imaging, we have a lot of preoperative diagnostics in order to prepare the surgery the best we can, but all that knowledge is so incredibly complex. Anna Roethe 6 CARS 2018 Preview “We have intraoperative imaging, we have a lot of preoperative diagnostics in order to prepare the surgery the best we can, but all that knowledge is so incredibly complex.”