A new White Paper from Medicrea has revealed very significant rod fracture reduction for the UNiD technology in comparison to traditional rods.
The company recently reached the 1,000-procedure milestone for its personalised rods.
Relative to manually-bent rods, patient-specific rods significantly reduced the incidence of postoperative rod breakage in adult complex spine surgical cases. The rods were created using preoperative patient imaging and the company’s Adaptive Spine Intelligence technology.
The study reviews a cohort of >450 adult spinal deformity patients with at least one year from the surgical implantation of patient-specific UNiD Rods. This includes more than 120 patients who additionally had pedicle subtraction osteotomy (PSO) performed. The rods were generated using Medicrea’s UNiD ASI systems-based technology for personalised spinal care. The authors are spine surgeons from the USA and France.
Rod fracture results
With a UNiD Rod, breakage was detected in 2.2% of all deformity patients and in 4.7% of cases including PSO. These rates decrease further when you remove patient-specific rods that were adjusted during the operation.
In the current literature involving non-personalised spinal implants, overall rod breakage incidence is reported as high as 14.9% of patients following adult spinal deformity surgery. When a PSO is performed, the rod fracture rate increases up to 22%. In these cases, 90% of failure is found to occur at, or adjacent to, the PSO level. Furthermore, the time to failure is most often seen to occur within 10 months after surgery.
Themistocles Protopsaltis, of NYU Langone Medical Center (New York City, USA) and co-author of the White Paper, states, “This review demonstrates that utilising digitally planned, patient-specific UNiD Rods which avoids manual rod contouring has a major impact on rod fracture incidence in the treatment of Adult Spinal Deformity.
“This is important because rod breakage leads to revision surgery at significant cost to the patient, hospital and payer.”
Protopsaltis continues, “Adopting an iterative, data-based approach that is shown to make spinal surgery more efficient can change a surgeon’s practice, making UNiD ASI a true advance in our standard of care.”
