UCL awarded £13m for surgical interventions centre

Facility will advance intraoperative imaging and sensing, data fusion and extraction, human-technology interfaces, tissue modelling, interventional instrumentation and surgical navigation

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Wellcome has awarded more than £13 million to University College London for a new surgical interventions centre.

The centre will advance engineering sciences in intraoperative imaging and sensing, data fusion and extraction, human-technology interfaces, tissue modelling, interventional instrumentation and surgical navigation. It will also bring together a team of engineering and clinical experts working to develop the new surgical technologies.

The advances will create an intuitive and highly personalised surgical platform that enables more precise, less invasive procedures. Greater precision will also mean more patients will be viable for complicated but life-altering surgery and those treated will benefit from safer, more localised treatments and a shorter recovery time in hospital.

Professor Sebastien Ourselin, the centre’s director, said: “Being able to apply our excellence in engineering to the field of surgical and interventional sciences will allow us to come up with truly innovative solutions to the range of clinical problems surgeons face. Our research will be developed in close collaboration with UCL’s six specialist research hospitals to ensure we are producing world-class, high-impact results."

The centre will be based at Charles Bell House which is undergoing refurbishment as part of Transforming UCL. The state of the art facilities will enable researchers from the Institute of Healthcare Engineering, the Division of Surgery and Interventional Sciences and the Centre for Medical Imaging to combine expertise on the project.

The facility will partner with specialist hospitals associated with UCL to ensure fast translation of technology to the clinic, including University College Hospital, National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Royal Free Hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital and Moorfields Eye Hospital.