Laparoscopy allows the surgeons to treat pathologies with considerably less trauma for the patient than classical open surgery. The laparoscope is a small camera inserted in the patient’s abdominopelvic cavity. Laparoscopy has been used for decades but still suffers from the impossibility of seeing the organs’ inner anatomy. This forms an important limitation because it slows down surgery, prevents finding some tumours and dramatically limits the use of laparoscopy. ViTAL (Virtual Transparency and Augmented Laparoscopy) is a concept specifically developed by our group of scientists, surgeons and radiologists as a solution to the current hidden-anatomy limitation of laparoscopy. We expect that the developed prototype will inrease the number of laparoscopy surgeries with as direct implication to reduce the hospitalization time and thus to improve the patients well being and furthermore reduce the costs.
The ViTAL concept is to modify the laparoscope’s video in realtime to emulate organ transparency and to highlight features invisible to the naked eye. The proposed project P-ViTAL (Precompetitive steps for ViTAL) aimed at developing a precompetitive software implementation of ViTAL. Technically, ViTAL exploits information extracted from routine radiological images such as Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) acquired before surgery. Such a combination of visual information cannot be achieved mentally, even by experienced surgeons. Concretely, P-ViTAL had two objectives: 1) to develop a precompetitive prototype and 2) to create communication material.
P-ViTAL represented the next important step towards our goal of creating a startup company. A feasibility analysis already confirmed that the market is open to the ViTAL technology and that it will be well received.
Towards the end of the P-ViTAL project, we created a spin-off company named SurgAR, in October 2019. SurgAR is led by a surgeon gynaecologist, and has as founding members two other surgeons and P-ViTAL's PI. In this respect, P-ViTAL has been a very successful project, for it allowed us to jump start the company with a concrete prototype (WP1) and to also develop a preliminary communication strategy (WP2). The start-up company was the winner of the innovation contest I-LAB 2019, a real growth accelerator for innovative companies. This competition identifies and supports business creation projects that meet the major societal challenges. SurgAR obtained a private licence for its software, which was also filed at APP.
