Increased Precision in Orthopedics
The need of implant surgery is increasing, partly due to the ageing population, partly due to increasing patient demands on mobility. There are, however, quality issues in orthopedics; in Sweden, for instance, care-related injuries occur at 15% of the procedures leading to an additional healthcare cost of >1 billion SEK/year.
In this project a portfolio of innovations providing ground-breaking precision improvements have been developed and validated in a close collaboration between industry, healthcare and academia. The project consortium consists of 14 organizations within these three sectors, where Sectra is the project coordinator and together with CMIV run the overall project management.
Traditionally, the orthopedic surgeon’s workflow for physical material (the implants) has been separated from the handling of digital images. A cornerstone here is to amalgamate these two areas, so that new innovative solutions can be created based on seamless couplings between digital and physical counterparts. Great opportunities are provided by modern imaging technology, which until now has not reached its full potential in orthopedic applications.
Fusing the Digital with the Physical
Solutions have been developed in five tracks, implant movement, patient movement, implant logistics, 3D print and pre-per-post integration, where CMIV primarily has been involved in patient movement and pre-per-post integration. Finally, the project also containe a sixth track that focused on ensuring a patient-centric view on innovation requirements, and working towards making the increased precision a professional norm in orthopedics.
A noteworthy achievement in the CMIV part of the project concerns the patient movement effort, led by Hans Tropp. The groundbreaking idea pursued is to combine a CT scan with marker-based motion capture, to create a dynamic model of the individual patient. There now is a working high-precision solution, that has been demonstrated at the Swedish orthopedic congress. It is being used in studies of femoroacetabular impingement and other orthopedic applications.
