NEW YORK, Ny. - 66-year-old Sam DeMaria has been living with chronic back pain for 15 years.
He has undergone six back surgeries. The first five brought temporary relief, but then he’d be laid up again.
“The only comfort I had was in my bed, on my back, with pillows under my leg," recalled DeMaria. "That was it. If I came downstairs, I lasted five minutes, went right back upstairs.”
Mount Sinai neurosurgeon Dr. Jeremy Steinberger explained: “He had scoliosis and multi-level, basically, numerous nerves that were getting compressed in numerous places.”
Steinberger and his team performed DeMaria’s sixth surgery, but this time, they had a new navigation system: machine vision technology.
“You can basically touch a probe to the patient, and you see where you are on the patient's spine,” Steinberger said.
Machine vision technology is similar to the technology and sophisticated software used in self-driving cars.
In a surgical suite, special cameras analyze the anatomy and create a 3D image. A light overhead takes a “flash” image. In four seconds, it gives surgeons thousands of fiducial points to register a patient’s CT scans.
“That's what links the patient to the technology and that's when you can check to confirm that you're accurate,” Steinberger added.
DeMaria exclaimed: “I was pain free after the surgery. I'm standing up straight and that's what I wanted to accomplish.”
One added benefit is that the new navigation system does not require a patient to have fluoroscopy medical imaging that requires a continuous X-ray image on a monitor, reducing a patient's exposure to radiation.
Gloss