Patent ID: 11908565
Assignee: MAZOR ROBOTICS LTD.
Field: Medical technology (Instruments)
Classification: CPC G  A | IPC A  G

Claim 22:
23. A surgical system for determining an optimal long-term orthopedic implant configuration for a spinal alignment correction in a subject, the system comprising:
a control unit, wherein the control unit comprises:
(i) a module for finite element analysis of orthopedic configurations;
(ii) an analytic engine for evaluating a long-term effect of implant configurations using previous cases documented in a large database;
(iii) a calculating unit for determining spinal alignment parameters from a virtual configuration of a spine corrected using a spinal implant arrangement;
(iv) a comparator unit for determining whether a predicted stress score of an implant configuration falls within a predetermined acceptable stress score for long term sustainability, the control unit being configured to determine an optimal implant configuration, by:
(a) based on a set of preoperative medical images, determining initial values and a desired corrected set of values of selected spinal alignment parameters;
(b) selecting at least one potential implant for correcting the selected spinal alignment parameters;
(c) digitally positioning, in the set of preoperative medical images, the at least one potential implant for correcting the selected spinal alignment parameters, to create at least one virtual configuration of at least one potential bone-implant combination;
(d) determining an acceptable long-term stress score range for the at least one virtual configuration based on (i) clinically relevant data of the subject, and (ii) similarly characterized cases from a medical database;
(e) for the at least one virtual configuration, (i) performing finite element analysis on the at least one potential implant to determine stress scores along an extent of the at least one potential implant; and (ii) calculating expected corrected values of the selected spinal alignment parameters; and
(f) selecting an implant from the at least one potential implant, which minimizes the long-term stress score; and

a measurement system configured to measure the stress in an implant inserted onto the spine of a subject, the measurement system comprising a camera adapted to determine a stress pattern arising in the implant by analyzing an image of a photoelastic coating on the inserted implant,
the measurement system being thus configured to enable adjustment intraoperatively of the at least one potential implant to minimize its stress score, thereby providing an improved long term orthopedic implant configuration.