The paper proposes a new, affordable method of surgical navigation for spine surgery which developed a combined method using computer-aided design (CAD) and finite-element analysis (FEA) with a 3D-printed navigation template customised for the patient.
Spinal fixation is a routine procedure for the treatment of unstable spine due to trauma, congenital malformations, degenerative diseases, and tumours. The accurate placement of screws in the spine is challenging, given the risk of damage to nearby structures such as the spinal cord, nerve roots, arteries, and veins.
Computer-assisted surgery (CAS) has been adopted as a safe and accurate guiding system for the placement of the screws in the spine. However, it is still the case that surgical manipulation after obtaining Computed Tomography (CT) or fluoroscopy images during surgery may cause CAS registration errors, which can result in incorrect positioning.
The advantages of the proposed technique compared to the conventional surgical navigation tools are the affordability, the potential to reduce intraoperative X-ray exposure, and the possibility for the consideration of patient-specific bone geometry and biomechanics. This new patient-specific and condition-specific approach can be widely used in revision spine surgeries or in challenging primary cases after its further clinical validations.
Article
(Frontiers in Surgery) P E Eltes, M Bartos, B Hajnal, A J Pokorni, L Kiss, D Lacroix, P P Varga, A Lazary.
