Royal Philips announces new, surgical navigation technology for image-guided surgery

Royal Philips announced it has developed an augmented-reality surgical navigation technology to assist surgeons performing image-guided open and minimally invasive spine surgery.

According to a company press release, the new technology will expand the company’s hybrid OR solutions to areas of image-guided surgery, such as spine, cranial and trauma procedures. The new technology will reportedly add capabilities to the company’s low-dose X-ray system. The navigation technology involves the use of high-resolution cameras mounted to an X-ray detector to take an image of the patient. According to the release, the external and internal 3-D views of the patient are combined to construct a 3-D augmented-reality view of the patient’s anatomy. “This unique augmented-reality technology is an example of how we expand our capabilities with innovative solutions in growth areas, such as spine, neuro and trauma surgery,” Ronald Tabaksblat, business leader of Image-Guided Therapy Systems at Philips, said in the release. “By teaming up with clinical innovation leaders, we continue to find ways to convert open surgery to minimally invasive treatment to reduce postoperative pain and expedite recovery.”

Philips hybrid ORs with this new technology will be placed in a network of 10 clinical collaborators to advance the technology. According to the release, a pre-clinical study on the new technology has shown significantly better overall accuracy for pedicle screw placement compared with techniques that did not use the augmented-reality surgical navigation technology.

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