UCL spinout secures funding to improve abdominal surgery using AI

A new spinout company from UCL and Imperial College London has received pre-seed funding to develop AI technology that could make laparoscopic surgery more effective. EnAcuity's technology could help surgeons carry out laparoscopies more safely and effectively by highlighting functional information in the body that is hard for the eye to detect. Laparoscopies are a form of minimally invasive surgery performed on the abdomen using small incisions and a thin tube with a video camera that shows the surgeon what is going on inside the patient's body. Typically, the cameras reproduce on screen what the surgeon would see for themselves if they were performing open surgery. The company's technology could transform laparoscopic surgery and enable surgeons to perform the procedures more precisely by displaying functional information that is undetectable to the naked eye. Dr Maria Leiloglou, EnAcuity's co-founder and CEO and an honorary research fellow at UCL Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering and at Imperial, said: "Surgeons have difficulty detecting some pathologies such as cancer and surgical structures of interest such as vessels and nerves, partly because the human eye is not sensitive enough to pick up on the subtle colour differences that distinguish them. By providing more information, our solution could mark a significant advancement in the field of minimally invasive surgery." EnAcuity's technology could also provide an alternative to hyperspectral imaging devices, which are better at discriminating colours than the human visual system but have drawbacks.