Our Impact

CSii completed the development of IGAR, a propriety robotic platform with image guidance and automation capabilities and software architecture that supports tele operation.

IGAR provides an unrivaled level of physical accuracy and precision in the biopsy and treatment of breast disease. CSii is working to complement this with a set of advanced decision support tools in aid of clinicians or operators navigating the diagnostic and interventional process.

The CSii-MDA start-up, Insight Medbotics Canada Corporation (IMCC), jointly owned by CSii and MDA, will create high value tech jobs in Southern Ontario and Canada. IMCC will attract bright, talented engineers and physicians and facilitate the training of scores of highly qualified individuals with new skills in the use of advanced medical technology.

Insight Medbotics is working to establish partners in distribution (including Hologic, GE Healthcare, Stryker and others) as well as therapeutic device manufacturers (Sanarus and others). Next steps will be to address global markets to export via subsidiaries and partnerships to markets in the US and Europe.

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has supported CSii through the Build in Canada Innovation Program which was established by the Government of Canada, enabling CSii to test the tele operative capabilities of IGAR. Teleoperation enables a clinician at a secondary, office site hospital to control the robot over a network instead of performing the procedure in person in the MRI suite. CSii has successfully completed proof of principle testing for this project. With IGAR, patients across Ontario and beyond could benefit from the skill of experienced radiologists that typically practice outside of small communities, and simultaneously avoid the costs, wait time, and anxiety associated with patient travel.

A teleoperated robotic system would connect community based hospitals to large teaching hospitals, eliminating any disparity in healthcare.

The ongoing support from the Canadian Space Agency CSA has enabled, the CSii-IBM Deep Learning project to successfully merge IGAR software with IBM;s Cognitive Computing System to conduct proof of concept testing on an autonomous IGAR system. This research was conducted on breast phantoms with embedded lesions identifiable during MRI imaging. The team successfully demonstrated the ability of the system to identify the suspicious lesion, plan a needle biopsy trajectory and conduct a needle biopsy with high degrees of accuracy and without human interaction.

This fully autonomous robotic system will be capable of carrying out all components of standard care for the treatment of early cancers in one continuous procedure without a physician present, thereby making it accessible for all patients regardless of their location, reducing the cancer care pathway from weeks to hours, feature which will serve Canadians by providing advanced medical healthcare to those living in remote areas of the country as well as providing great benefits to future plans for long term space exploration.

This concept of autonomous, image guided intervention may be relevant to future CSA missions where expert medical staff is not available to a remote crew and automated intervention may be required to address an acute medical need.

With the success of IGAR-Breast, the team at CSii is working to expand IGAR’s capabilities to include multi-modal imaging and needlescopic interventions for treatment of many different early cancers.

We are currently working on MR-guided Brachytherapy treatment for prostate, liver and breast cancer.