1134866 University of Houston; Marc Garbey 1134842 University of Florida; Scott Berceli
The University of Houston and the University of Florida are collaborating to establish the proposed center, with the University of Houston as the lead institution.
The Center for Cyber-Physical Systems for the Hospital Operating Room (CPSOR) vision is to provide the forum for industry/hospital/university cooperative research on the further development, validation, and industrial implementation of the emerging concepts in the design of operating room, and in the optimization of procedural and surgical interventions. This center will be the strong arm of Modern Surgery enabled by computational science and technologies. The center will catalyze large-scale technology projects that request inter-disciplinary efforts between surgeons and computational science in a broad sense.
This collaboration should advance technology, discovery, understanding and training in the operating room. It will utilize the facilities in Houston and spread technology coupled with medical skills which will benefit society. The center will operate at the core of the Texas Medical Center that is the largest medical center in the word, and benefit from the site in University of Florida Gainesville that has been a champion to encourage business startups in bioengineering and technology transfer. The center will also benefit from the forty million dollar infrastructure of the Methodist Institute for Technology Innovation and Education (MITIE) that trains about 2000 surgeons per year coming from all over the word. The center will benefit from a new established unique international dual curriculum in computational surgery.
We have set, with this planning grant, the foundation of the first multi-site center in the country entirely focused on the new synergy between cyber-physical systems and surgery intervention. This center has several unique features: (1) Each Site of the Center have a dual academic-research hospital structure that can address both the design and operation of the operating room, the training of surgeons with simulators, as well as new technology solutions to improve surgery outcomes. (2) The center is supported by an established international dual graduate curriculum in computational surgery, which is competitive in international markets. (3) The center benefits from the first-class $40M infrastructure of the Methodist Institute for Technology Innovation and Education in surgery (MITIE). This unique environment accelerates the feasibility of the technical transfer by providing extensive validation thanks to a team of surgeons with international expertise. (4) The center develop the vertical integration of medical imaging technology, medical devices, computer hardware and software components, computational methods, simulators for training that are traditionally addressed by different companies with very little cross talks or collaborations. This center starts with two nodes that are respectively University of Houston/MITIE and University of Florida/ Shands Hospital and the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center. Overall, this center gather sat least 20 faculties who have excellent research records in imaging, robotics, modeling and simulation. These faculties from the University of Houston, University of Florida and The Methodist Hospital Research Institute might be scientists and surgeons, or experts in computational science in a broad sense, which include all forms of computing in engineering or traditional sciences. The main topics covered by the projected center are (I) Computational Surgery and Disease Management (II) Image Processing and Virtualization for Surgical Intervention (III) Image Driven Intervention and Robotics (III) Lessons from Modeling & Simulation with Experimental and Clinical Data (IV) Curriculum in computational surgery and new technologies for interdisciplinary training. We have been looking for industry partners committed to support the research effort of hybrid industry-academic research teams on their most critical problems. Our industry partners to start this center are Boston Scientific Endoscopy, The GID Group, Karl Storz, The Methodist Hospital, Lemma and Mako Surgical Corp. Other industries who have expressed interest in this project are: Intuitive Surgical, Hansen Medical, Covidien, Olympus Medical Systems Corp., Steris Corp, Phillips Health Care, Laerdal Medical, Philips, Siemens, etc… and a number of small companies.
