At last week’s Excellence in Medical Technology Awards ceremony attended by your humble editors, Frost & Sullivan presented Veran Medical Technologies, a St. Louis, MO firm, the North American Award for Technology Innovation of the Year. The company developed the IG4 electromagnetic system for tracking organ movement and position of diagnostic biopsy needles, as well as other interventional radiology devices, in hopes of offering a “significant advantage over common CT guidance with the ability to approach lesions from an oblique angle in a quick, efficient manner.” The company says that its IG4 system is smart enough to interface with CT data in a real time and correlate it to readings taken at the same point in the patient’s natural movement cycles (respiration, heartbeat, etc.).
More about the system from the press release:
The advantage of the IG4 is that it requires no user interaction to complete registration. The system incorporates advanced auto-segmentation and proprietary design for patient tracking, which serves to eliminate the possibility of user error being introduced into the system through the process of manually selecting registration fiducials both in the image and on the patient.
In fact, Veran Medical has a wide array of tracking devices from universal adapters that can be applied to any vendor’s biopsy and ablation needles to its own proprietary tip-tracked biopsy needles that have localization sensors integrated at the tip of the device. Tip-tracked needles help enable very fine gauge needles to be accurately navigated.
Further, the IG4 enables physicians to navigate needles without the added radiation exposure that physicians and hospital staff are subjected to by using CT Fluoro. Another major benefit is that it is not limited to navigating in a single plane or on lower quality images that CT Fluoro requires. The IG4 allows a physician to select any approach to target the lesion with its global positioning system-like accuracy for high-quality images.
What differentiates Veran’s 4-D registration principle from those of its competitors is that it includes an automatic 3-D spatial registration between the electromagnetic field generator and the real-time CT scans of the patient anatomy, and a temporal registration capable of determining when the patient is at the same point in the respiratory cycle as when the CT scan was acquired. While competing technologies implement traditional rigid 3-D registration algorithms, they fail to take into account the inaccuracies caused by patient motion.
Product page: IG4 Plug-N-Play Delivery System
Press release: Frost & Sullivan Lauds Veran Medical for its IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System
