The Center for Surgical Innovation: Achieving Better, Safer Care.

The Center for Surgical Innovation is a one-of-a-kind research facility dedicated to improving surgical procedures and developing new surgical tools and technologies to improve patient care.

Surgeons are too often limited by what they cannot see: anatomy that is difficult to reach or diseases that are not visible to the naked eye. While advances in imaging such as real-time X-rays during surgery and MRI and CT scans beforehand have revolutionized countless surgical procedures, tremendous opportunities for surgical innovation remain. A primary constraint is the lack of operating room time for research purposes.

That constraint will soon be removed, thanks to the construction of the Center for Surgical Innovation (CSI), prioritized for translational research and equipped with MRI and CT machines that can move in and out of its operating rooms. For surgeries in which a few millimeters means the difference between restoring a physical ability and causing permanent disability, or between curing cancer and missing a bit of tumor that may grow back, 3-D imaging during surgery is priceless to individual patients. And when used in a surgical research setting, 3-D imaging enables surgeons and engineers to improve both common and complex surgeries for entire patient populations.

The CSI will allow surgeons and engineers to innovate like never before, rapidly developing, testing, and validating new surgical tools and techniques, with the goal of achieving better, safer, and, in some cases, less-costly care for patients everywhere.

The CSI is a joint collaboration between Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, with capital funding from the National Institutes of Health.