Vertify Probe a device for intraoperative measurement and interpretation of bone strength during spinal surgery
Project Abstract:
Over 50 million Americans have osteoporosis With the growing elderly population an increasing number of spine surgeries are performed in osteoporotic patients Complications after spinal surgery are more numerous and of greater severity in osteoporotic patients with much higher health resource consumption and poor quality of life for patients Many spinal instrumentation complications can be avoided if the surgeon is aware that the patient is osteoporotic and employs evidencebased strategies to alter their surgical technique and mitigate the risk of failure Preoperative DEXA scans for diagnosing osteoporosis are not always available cannot be used in the operative room and when available does not measure bone quality at the site of interest There is an unmet clinical need to know a patients bone density intraoperatively very specifically at the site of interaction between the instrumentation and the skeleton Our goal is to design a device that is inserted into the bone that measures bone quality at multiple levels within the vertebrae specifically where the screws or other instrumentation will be placed In addition to the measuring bone density intraoperatively during spine surgery it will be linked to software that lights up red yellow or green depending on the severity of the measurement and provides surgeon with guidance to management of lowdensity measurements A preliminary search shows no such devices are commercially available and large size of the spinal instrumentation market provides an opportunity to create a patentable device to fill this unmet need
