SpineGuard has announced that its PediGuard platform has been adopted by the 20th major spine-surgery teaching institution in the United States: Children’s Hospital of New Orleans.
“We are very pleased that twenty of the USA’s finest teaching hospitals have now adopted our PediGuard bone-monitoring devices to ensure optimal training of their residents and fellows for safe pedicle screw placement,” says Stephane Bette, co-founder and US general manager of SpineGuard.
“An obvious advantage of the PediGuard technology is that there is no radiation required during pedicle screw placement. There is increasing concern about the long-term consequences of medical treatment based radiation exposure. The dosage is cumulative, and has been shown to significantly affect the lifetime risk for cancer,” says Andrew G King, orthopaedic surgeon, Children’s Hospital New Orleans; and, professor and chair, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, LSU Health Sciences Center. “For this reason alone, pedicle screw placement navigated by sensors in the pedicle probe is gaining popularity, and with technological advances, should become standard.”
“PediGuard has helped me guide residents in placing safe and accurate pedicle screws. This was corroborated by a recent cadaver study we conducted comparing the accuracy of screw placement among residents with varied experience implanting pedicle screws,” says Faheem Sandhu, professor of neurosurgery, director of Spine Surgery, Georgetown University Hospital.
Dean Chou, associate professor of neurosurgery, The UCSF Spine Center, University of California, San Francisco, USA, says that “To consistently ensure safe and accurate pedicle screw placement while training the future generation of surgeons, we provide our residents and fellows with the best technologies available. The PediGuard device certainly ranks as a critical instrument to ensure safe spine surgery.”
