AUA 2018: “Pin the Tumor on the Kidney”: An Evaluation of How Surgeons Translate CT and MRI data to 3D Models

San Francisco, CA USA (UroToday.com) Ms Wake from New York University School of Medicine presents here research on patient-specific 3D models as tools for pre-operative surgical planning, virtual reality (VR) simulators, intra-operative guidance and patient education. These 3D models provide an intuitive understanding of the surgical anatomy, however there is limited data to quantify the added value of these models. Her research team sought out to identify the ability of surgeons to translate their CT or MRI understanding to a 3D model.

In their study they constructed 10 patient-specific 3D models of complex renal masses (nephrometery score ≥7). These models were used in a computer-aided design (CAD) software to evaluate surgeon’s understanding of the relevant anatomy. While viewing the 3D model, each surgeon was instructed to place the renal mass on the 3D model as it corresponded to their interpretation based on CT or MRI imaging. The placement of the renal mass by the surgeon was then compared to the actual tumor location to evaluate the spatial overlap accuracy (1=perfect similarity, 0= no similarity).

Interestingly, they found a very low score for the entire cohort, 0.25 ± 0.24. In fact, three cases had no overlap between the surgeon placement and actual location. If these three cases were excluded, the score increased slightly to 0.37.

Ms Wake concludes that there is a poor correlation between surgeon’s interpretation of the renal tumor and its actual location based on CT or MRI imaging. This study sheds light on the deficiency of utilizing traditional two-dimensional imaging to re-create mental 3D images for complex cases.

Presented by: Nicole Wake

Written by: Egor Parkhomenko, Department of Urology, University of California-Irvine at the 2018 AUA Annual Meeting - May 18 - 21, 2018 – San Francisco, CA USA