Advancing Endoscopic Cardiac Surgery through an AI-Enabled Guided Prediction System

Endoscopic cardiac surgery offers patients a minimally invasive alternative to traditional open-heart procedure. This approach involves small incisions and use of an endoscope equipped with a high-definition 3D camera, allowing surgeons to perform complex heart surgeries with enhanced precision. Benefits of endoscopic cardiac surgery include smaller incision resulting in minimal scarring, reduced recovery time, less postoperative pain and reduced complications and better surgical outcomes. Patients undergoing heart surgery fear the sternotomy or chest splitting that is involved. This product will help more surgeons to move away from it and adopt endoscopic approach, and hopefully benefit many patients and the NHS. At present less than 20% of procedures are done with a non sternotomy approach in the UK. Our aim is to empower cardiac surgeons move away from sternotomy approach into endoscopic approach as this not only benefits the patients in terms of having fewer complications and early discharge but also benefits the hospitals in terms of cost savings. Our innovation is a AI-enabled CT-guided prediction system for safe and reproducible methods of performing non-sternotomy cardiac surgery by providing detailed visualisation of critical structures, automating the process and integrating seamlessly into surgical planning workflows.