Medical imaging and simulation

Abstract

This chapter covers two important advancements in the combination of medicine and technology: Research on integration of medical imaging with the Operating Room (OR) workflow and advancements in virtual simulation of surgical scenarios. Extracting information from patients’ images is the first step in the modern clinical workflow. Most diagnosis are performed on medical images such as CT scans, MRI and ultrasound scans; computer assistance has a pivotal role in improving image understanding. Nevertheless today such information is not yet widely available in the OR since there are no established methods that could localise and overlap the same structures analysed in the pre-operative phase with the configuration found during a surgery. In other words there is no guarantee that the pre-operative imaging will match what the surgeon sees during the operation.