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Hopkins Bayview Campus became one of only two institutes in the country to use the intraoperative CT scanner to aid in complex brain surgeries.

According to Alessandro Olivi, chair of the neurosurgery department at Hopkins Medical Institute, the iCT scanner's main purposes are precise control over surgery and the improvement of patient safety. The scanner monitors a surgery's progress in real time, eliminating the need to transfer the patient to another room for imaging, and uses a navigational wand points to the area that needs to be operated upon, improving the accuracy of surgery.

The intraoperative CT (iCT) was installed last December during the expansion of the newly-constructed set of operating rooms.

"These two rooms are designed to be continuous, and in the middle, there is a CT scan," Olivi said. "The CT scan has the ability to move on rails and serve the two operating rooms. If I have a case right now in this operating room, I will be able to use the CT Scan, even though they are operating in the other room."

The introduction of the iCT to the Bayview Campus was no small feat. Olivi collaborated with a former Hopkins Neurosurgery Resident, Eric Sipos, now the medical director at the Arizona Institute, to obtain a model that would be used in the newly constructed operating rooms.

Before the introduction of the iCT, surgeons often based their surgery on CT scans that were taken hours, and even days, before the scheduled surgery. This often becomes a problem, as the positions of healthy or cancerous tissue can shift even in the brief time between imaging and surgery.

Post-procedure, patients had to be wheeled out of the operating room and into the radiology department, where more scans would verify the removal of the tumor, or the successful insertion of devices such as spine pins. If the procedure was not satisfactory, the patient would have been re-scheduled for more surgeries, which could lead to further complications. However, with the iCT, doctors can immediately verify if the procedure was successful.

The iCT scan combines what is known as the three modalities: the CT scan that outlines bone structures, the MRI done the day before that outlines soft tissue, and the CTA, a CAT scan with a CT angiogram that outlines the blood vessels.

Source: Hopkins Bayview Campus

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