CMIC Seminar: Ultrasound-guided Interventions: Translating Guidance Technology into Clinical Practice

Speaker: Dean Barratt
UCL Contact: Dominique Drai (Visitors from outside UCL please email in advance).
Date/Time: 25 Jan 17, 13:00 - 14:00
Venue: Roberts 106

Abstract

The trend towards minimally- and non-invasive interventions, which aim to reduce tissue trauma, shorten procedure times, and accelerate patient recovery, is now well-established in medicine. This trend continues to drive a clinical need for new guidance technologies to support new surgical and non-surgical techniques that are less invasive than traditional interventional approaches to diagnosing and treating disease. Such interventions are critically reliant on computer-assisted guidance technologies, many of which involve imaging, but meeting the clinical requirements for an effective guidance system typically presents a number of demanding technical and practical challenges that must be addressed if these technologies are to be widely adopted in clinical practice. As an interventional imaging technique, ultrasound is safe, versatile, portable, relatively inexpensive, and widely used for localising tissue structures and realtime instrument guidance during a wide range of procedures from needle biopsy to tumour ablation. However, ultrasound is notoriously operator dependent and produces images that are commonly perceived as being difficult to interpret despite often being rich in information.

In this seminar, I will examine the primary requirements for image guidance systems using ultrasound-based technologies for guiding prostate, liver, and pancreatic cancer interventions as examples, and present solutions, developed as part of my research, which combine multimodal image registration, soft-tissue organ motion modelling, statistical analysis, instrument tracking, and systems engineering to develop clinical image guidance systems. I will also describe my experience of taking a technology from early PhD research through to a CE-marked commercial product.

Dean Barratt

Dean Barratt is an alumnus of the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. He moved to UCL in 2005 when CMIC was formed after working as a post-doc in David Hawke's Computational Imaging Sciences research group at Guy's Hospital for 3 years. Shortly after moving to UCL, he was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering / EPSRC Research Fellowship, focusing on image registration techniques to enable ultrasound-guided interventions. After completing this fellowship, Dean was appointed as Senior Lecturer in 2011 and as Reader in 2014. In 2015 he co-founded SmartTarget Ltd., a UCL spin-out aimed at commercialising software for guiding minimally-invasive prostate cancer interventions, developed by his research group. He is currently CSO of SmartTarget Ltd.