A 5,700-gross-square-foot Advanced Multimodality Image Guided Operating (AMIGO) suite has opened at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston. As the world’s first three-bay operating suite to house MRI, PET/CT, Ultrasound and Angiography in one place, along with surgical navigation tools and image registering and integration software, AMIGO offers significant advancements to developing image-guided surgical treatment procedures.
Project team members included Payette, an architectural design firm specializing in complex buildings for academic teaching, medical and scientific research, and healthcare; Suffolk Construction of Boston as the Construction Manager; BR+A Engineers of Watertown as the mechanical and electrical consultant; RW Sullivan of Boston as plumbing and fire protection consultant; and Weidlinger Associates, Inc. of Cambridge as structural engineer, among others.
In this clinical care and research facility, a central operating room is linked to adjacent imaging rooms on either side, allowing the patient to remain positioned on the operating table while the ceiling-mounted MRI can move to the patient during a surgical procedure. The suspension of a moving 33,000-pound magnet system on a ceiling mounted track allows for interoperable flexibility and permits rapid and seamless transitions between imaging and intervention. Within the same environment, multiple imaging activities can occur, allowing the patient to receive care from teams of multidisciplinary specialists. The integrated systems provide immediate access to imaging and enable the precise, minimally invasive image-guided techniques. The end result is a safe and expeditious experience for the patient and a more effective application of intraoperative imaging for the surgeons, radiologists, nurses, and technologists providing care.
The array of infrastructure necessary to enable this technology was concealed behind walls and above ceilings, which were kept neutral in appearance so as not to compete with critical patient information displays. The kinetic qualities of the suite are captured on the floor, where the arc of the operating table’s rotation and the limits of the magnet’s Gauss lines are rendered in a palette of colors. While the AMIGO Suite is innovative by today’s standards, its design also incorporates opportunities for future growth and development.
