New research at Tyndall will revolutionise the future of surgery through radiation-free navigation of surgical instruments. Using magnetic tracking will lead to more accurate surgery and significantly improved patient outcomes.
Dr. Pádraig Cantillon–Murphy, Tyndall National Institute at UCC was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant worth €2 million, to progress his research into revolutionizing the future of surgery. His ambition is to use enhanced magnetic tracking to minimise the need for harmful x-ray and CT radiation, whilst also enabling more accurate surgery and significantly improving patient outcomes.
His project, DEEP FIELD, aims to lay the foundations for the world's fastest, most accurate and robust, radiation-free navigation platform for image-guided surgery using magnetic tracking.
Dr. Cantillon-Murphy is investigating how surgeons can navigate instruments beyond the camera's field of view without using harmful x-rays.
Commenting he said, “The potential of magnetic tracking to navigate surgical instruments has long been appreciated but current technology lacks sufficient accuracy, speed, robustness and immunity to magnetic field distortion to change the clinical paradigm.
ERC Grants are highly-competitive and are awarded to exceptional candidates to pursue ground-breaking foundational research. DEEP FIELD will break through the scientific frontier in surgical navigation to make magnetic tracking the new gold standard in surgical instrument navigation.
“The results of DEEP FIELD will significantly reduce or eliminate the use of real-time radiation sources such as x-ray and CT in many procedures while also enabling more accurate surgery, advanced image fusion and significantly improved patient outcomes”.
His research will enable faster and more accurate magnetic tracking than what is currently available through the development of new and ambitiously complex magnetic sensors, including the first on-chip sensor suitable for system-in-package (SiP) fusion with other sensor types. DEEP FIELD will demonstrate entirely novel algorithms for surgical instrument tracking using machine learning approaches to compensate for magnetic field distortion, a major shortcoming of current technology. An ambitious plan to test the performance of DEEP FIELD in realistic pre-clinical settings will provide the scientific foundation for intra-operative instrument tracking in cardiovascular navigation, endoscopy and robotic surgery without reliance on harmful radiation.
Pádraig is an academic of the highest calibre – he is the recipient of the SFI’s Career Development Award (CDA) Programme, which supports excellent investigators in the earlier stages of their research career; he is an MIT graduate; a former Marie Curie Fellow; a senior member of IEEE; and Senior Lecturer in Engineering at UCC.
Commenting on the ERC Award, William Scanlon, CEO, Tyndall National Institute said,
"Pádraig’s ground-breaking ERC project DEEP FIELD will revolutionise the future of surgery by its ambition to present the world with a new state of the art radiation-free navigation platform for image-guided surgery using magnetic tracking. This is a landmark moment for Tyndall as we pursue our ambitious 2025 vision, harnessing our research power to make a real difference in human as well as economic terms”.
Congratulations to Professor Maria McNamara and Dr Andrey Shkoporov, UCC who were also in receipt of the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grants.