The multifunctional therapy room of the future: image guidance, interdisciplinarity, integration and impact on patient pathways

With few exceptions the interventional rooms of the present are either imaging suites or sterile operating rooms. Their users are restricted to either percutaneous procedures or to two-staged image-guided surgery without intra-operative imaging control. Since interventional therapy of the future will be minimally invasive and since minimally invasive therapy is essentially image-guided therapy, a new physical place for these activities has to be devised: the multifunctional therapy room of the future integrates sophisticated imaging and image guidance modalities together with advanced surgical and life-support equipment in a sterile environment [1, 2, 3]. Even given a high degree of integration, this will be a complex and costly piece of medical technology. These two factors--complexity and cost-- require interdisciplinary technological and medical collaboration to bring it into existence, distribute its cost and maximize usage and medical benefit. Yet another dimension of multifunctionality will be introduced and a significant impact on the care of vitally threatened patients will be exerted by using this room not only for elective image-guided therapy but also for emergent one-stop diagnosis and treatment. Motivation, technology, implementation strategies and funding of this image-guided, integrated and interdisciplinary therapy room, as well as a comprehensive approach combining emergency care and elective computer-assisted therapy (CAT), are discussed in this paper.