Research Services

We provide a highly realistic operating room setting, in which research teams, start-ups, R&D divisions, and clinicians from universities, hospitals, and industry can conduct data gathering, system integration, surgical method development, and validation tests. The OR-X not only offers the ideal infrastructure but also has highly qualified surgical and technical staff on hand to provide a personalised service. 

For each booking, our operating room staff takes care of all aspects of the surgical procedure, including specimen preparation, instrumentation, and medical imaging. On the technical side, you can make use of our extensive portfolio of state-of-the-art equipment and the expertise within our technology units when conducting your experiments. After your experiments, your data are available for download in a trusted research environment, where they can also be archived if desired.

The OR-X is a National research infrastructure of the  SERI Roadmap of Research Infrastructures 2023. Within this context the following technological units are implemented on top of the surgical core facility.

The OR-X was designed from the ground up as a flexible and scalable infrastructure to meet the research needs of today and tomorrow.

The core surgical facility incorporates a high-performance research network that provides fibre-based up- and downstream data processing from medical imaging and research devices to and from our computational and storage server infrastructure. The OR-X operates according to a bring-your-own hardware and software concept in which our scientific integration service provides support for the integration of user components.

The OR-X equipment pool includes a wide range of devices that can be integrated into research experiments. These include endoscopes, fluoroscopy and cone beam CT devices, camera systems, robots, augmented and virtual reality displays, and computer-aided surgery equipment. Various wall and ceiling mounting options are available for medical and research equipment. 

OR-X experiments can be complemented with the diagnostic imaging infrastructure available at Balgrist, which offers state-of-the-art CT and MRI devices for pre- and post-experimental imaging.

The services of the OR-X's three technology units can be complemented by additional R&D services provided by the research units of Balgrist.

The 3D Planning and Printing Center provides services for anatomical segmentation, 3D surgical planning and post-experimental evaluations, as well as 3D printing services for the fabrication of customized surgical instruments or device mounts.

The Unit for Clinically Applied Research supports researchers in ethical and regulatory matters, study design and documentation. 

The Digital Medicine group supports the FAIRification of datasets, multimodal data fusion, deployment of ML models on the OR-X infrastructure, and integration of devices into the network.