The Innovation Center for Computer-assisted surgery is a research initiative within the „Forschungsinitiative Unternehmen Region“ program funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research. It was founded in March 2005 as a central facility at the University of Leipzig. It is a place of research for surgeons from various disciplines as well as engineers and computer scientists, who collaborate on the development of state-of-the-art technologies for the operating room of the future. Today ICCAS is an internationally competitive research center for computer-assisted surgery and the core of a medicine

technology cluster in Saxony / Leipzig with a number of successful external fundings, start-ups, contentwise and structural pulses at the University of Leipzig and neighboring universities. Currently there are three interdisciplinary research groups working in cooperation with partners from academia and industry to achieve the desired goals. The continuously increasing flood of data on modern information and communication technology also brings a significant change to the workflow in the operating room. Clinics and their assistance systems are mostly totally unprepared for this kind of situation. The vision of ICCAS

is the integration of all necessary operations for a patient-specific information to ensure optimal computer-based assistance to the surgeon. The goal is to develop a model-based surgical automation which provides the best possible information to the surgeon from the analysis to therapeutic decisions and the delivery of data. In this context ICCAS is working on the realisation of a hightech facility for daily operation planning of surgical applications in which assistance systems are used. Those will contribute significantly to the improvement for the safety of operations.