About

Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the Innovation Center Computer Assisted Surgery (ICCAS) was established in March 2005 at the Medical Faculty of the Universität Leipzig. ICCAS is an interdisciplinary cooperation between the disciplines surgery, computer science, and medical engineering. ICCAS focuses on outstanding and internationally competitive research in computer assisted surgery and aims to attract young scientists as well as to transfer the innovative research findings into companies to create innovative products for the future operating room.

The activities of the ICCAS research groups include methodological work, such as theoretical modeling approaches, and practical engineering approaches to develop concepts for the digital operating room of the future. The general ICCAS philosophy emphasizes patient model-based concepts and workflow management in the operating room. Based on funding of the European Union and the Saxon Ministry of Science and Fine Arts, ICCAS contributes to the development of surgical standards research with the objective of implementing the developed concepts in the DICOM standard.

ICCAS also contributes to the teaching at the Universität Leipzig. In the past years, an increasing number of medical and engineering students have become interested in the topic of computer-assisted surgery. This is an important step to establish computer assisted surgery techniques in clinical routine and research.

All the research outcome of the innovative methods and devices at ICCAS are systematically evaluated with scientific assessment methods together with academic and clinical colleagues from national and international partner universities. In the past years, the strategy of ICCAS not only resulted in recognition as a top level research center for computer assisted surgery, but also led to the founding of two companies, Phacon and SWAN. Phacon focuses on the creation of innovative surgery training systems . SWAN provides expertise in analyzing surgical and medical workflows to optimize clinical routine and to identify organizational bottlenecks.