Though medtech has advanced enough to comfortably guide surgeons through some procedures in real time, more complex surgeries still require extensive advance planning—which can also be helped along by new technologies.
In the case of complication-prone procedures like those to correct spinal deformities and degeneration, for example, Medtronic has developed the UNiD Spine Analyzer software, which not only helps surgeons plot out a plan of attack for complex spine surgeries but also predicts how a patient will react to the surgery in the ensuing months.
The latest version of the platform has been cleared by the FDA, Medtronic reported Thursday, adding new artificial intelligence tools for both planning and predictive purposes.
The UNiD platform’s AI draws on a database of more than 10,000 surgical cases—a number that continuously grows as the platform is used in new procedures—to simulate multiple approaches to a procedure, mapping out potential patient responses to each. Once a surgeon has selected an approach, the software can design patient-specific rods to be implanted during the surgery. After the procedure, the platform’s AI compiles and saves its results to be used in presentations, clinical studies and future surgeries.
Among the newly FDA-cleared updates to the platform is the addition of a machine learning algorithm aimed specifically at degenerative spine procedures. The AI has been designed to guide surgeons through the planning process for lower lumbar spine procedures, while also predicting the compensatory mechanisms that the body will produce in response to the procedure for six months afterwards.
According to Medtronic, surgical planning plays an especially important role in these degenerative procedures, since as many as 62% of patients may remain misaligned after a corrective procedure. That hugely increases the risk of further degeneration of the discs around the surgical site and can require follow-up surgeries to correct.
The company has also updated its existing predictive algorithms within the UNiD platform that estimate how the spines of both adult and pediatric patients will react to procedures to treat spinal deformities.
Finally, the re-released software fine-tunes the UNiD Hub, where all surgical results, patient outcomes and other clinical data are collected to help track patients throughout the entire treatment process.
The FDA’s nod for the updated UNiD platform comes shortly after Medtronic announced another regulatory win for its growing portfolio of spine surgery tech. That was presented to the LigaPass 2.0 system that Medtronic acquired in its 2020 acquisition of France’s Medicrea International.
The UNiD platform can be used to help plan out the placement of the LigaPass technology, which comprises sets of band connectors that weave through the spine to reinforce its connections to surgical implants.