Using AI to create 3D printed models to reduce a rapidly growing surgical procedure backlog caused by COVID19

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Axial3D's vision is to transform the quantity and quality of surgeries that NHS Trusts can complete, as they start to recover from this COVID crisis, with the application of this vision for this project at the Belfast Trust, being to rapidly address the increasing backlog of critical surgeries. Since the start of the COVID crisis, all NHS Trusts have had to reduce the number of surgeries they are performing every week, in many cases stopping entirely. Every week this surgical capacity reduction continues, increases the burden on surgical teams, causing a life-threatening backlog in complex and critical care surgeries.Professor Derek Alderson, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, said at the end of March 2019: _"The backlog of patients waiting to start treatment continues to grow. There are now over 100,000 more patients waiting longer than 18 weeks to start treatment when compared with the same time last year. There is an urgent need for a plan to deal with the increasing backlog of patients"._Axial3D's focus for this project is to immediately provide surgeons with a game-changing new level of insight into their patient's anatomy - micro mm accurate 3D printed models. These models give surgeons a unique insight into the precise nature of the patient's condition that to date, they only will see when they have actually started the surgical procedure. Surgical teams in over 100 hospitals around the world already use our 3D models and every day provide us with quantified testimony as to the game-changing impact they have on planning surgeries. As part of this project Axial3D will develop an innovative solution using AI to help the NHS receive more of these models for patients during and after the COVID crisis. This unique approach of using artificial intelligence, allows us to automatically create 3D printed models of the orthopaedic or cardiac condition for each patient. We create these models automatically from the patient's own scans. By providing models for 105 patients, over the 8 month project, the orthopaedic and cardiac teams in the Belfast Trust believe we _can significantly reduce or even remove the backlog of surgeries due to COVID_. We will measure the benefits of the use of our models during this project on each patient, and then share the results with the wider NHS, offering the potential for a fundamental change to the way surgeries are planned.