Medicrea’s UNiD lab services have now been used in more than 500 surgeries worldwide. The services include a real-time support team to surgeons in the pre-operative planning of spinal procedures, order fulfillment for the company’s UNiD patient-specific spinal rod and a detailed post-operative analysis.
With UNiD’s customised rods, surgeons can perform spinal surgery more accurately, efficiently, and safely using the surgeon’s design from UNiD’s pre-operative planning and analysis phase, according to a company release. The patient-specific rods are available in two alloys (titanium TA6V ELI/cobalt chromium) and two diameters (5.5mm/6mm), matching global standards. Eliminating the archaic method of manually bending rods in the operating room, UNiD provides a unique surgical solution to traditional spinal surgery.
In addition to its patient-specific rods, UNiD offers a team of experts trained in X-ray analysis, sagittal alignment, and the latest clinical data in spinal correction, who prepare a series of documents for the surgeon and the designated hospital staff. The pre-operative documents are provided to the surgeon and can be filed directly in the patient’s medical record. The documents are also reviewed at the start of every surgery to align the operating room team on the strategy chosen by the surgeon. Post-operatively, UNiD lab services provide analysis of each surgical procedure and the surgeon’s case series, including a comparison with normative data to provide the benefit of data analysis to the surgeon and ultimately the patient.
Denys Sournac, founder, chief executive officer and chairman of Medicrea, states, “Despite a growing body of evidence, most surgeons do not take into account the patient’s parameters pre-operatively simply because no appropriate solution was offered…before Medicrea introduced the UNiD platform and associated services, including the UNiD lab.”
The UNiD lab services are intended to enhance Medicrea’s commitment to the development of personalized implants and surgeon-specific services for patient-specific needs in the treatment of spinal pathologies. The ability to collect, centralise and analyse large amounts of anonymous clinical data from surgical centres worldwide should help better understand the correlation between sagittal parameters and clinical outcomes as well as the efficiency of various surgical strategies for differentiating patients.
Peter G Passias, an orthopaedic surgeon in New York, USA, who performed the 500th UNiD surgery comments, “I have been using the UNiD rod and services consistently over the last year because this fulfils my obligation of means to deliver superior patient outcome through proper planning and respect of sagittal parameters. Bending a straight rod during operating room time is a technique of the past and is at best a guess of whether we have obtained our surgical goals. Further it is not accurate, not repeatable and contributes to a loss of surgery time. I suspect other surgeons will continue this trend towards pre-operative customised design of the surgical rods in complex deformity cases.”
Medicrea is also working to extend its platform of UNiD personalized products, notably into the cervical spine, with more on this later in 2016, according to the company release. “We are working to expand the indications-for-use to provide more patients with the opportunity to benefit from UNID™, which is now possible through a variety of new technologies, like 3D printing, big data analysis and other proprietary processes we have developed internally,” Sournac states.
