SpineAlign

Approximately 55,000 patients undergo corrective surgery for spinal deformity every year. These surgeries involve the placement of screws and rods to reconstruct the patient’s spine to correct for their misalignment. Despite efforts to obtain optimal outcomes, up to 68% of cases remain misaligned postoperatively. In addition, approximately 10% of these misaligned patients have severe enough residual deformity that they require revision surgeries, as spinal imbalance is strongly correlated with decreased quality of life. The patients who do not require revisions must live with this remaining deformity and associated reduced quality of life. Postoperative misalignment is attributed in part to the fact that tools for an intraoperative assessment of alignment are lacking. Currently, preoperative planning platforms allow the surgeon to simulate surgical techniques that should result in the optimal alignment outcomes for their patients. However, this workflow breaks down as there is not currently an adequate mechanism of feedback in the operating room to inform the surgeon with high fidelity if their alignment goals have been achieved. For instance, surgeons can intraoperatively obtain radiographs of the patient’s spine, but most intraoperative machines only offer a limited field of view (3-4 vertebrae at a time). In addition, these options entails excess radiation, significant disruption to workflow, and the challenge of assessing spinal alignment across the full spinal column (encompassing up to 25 vertebrae). SpineAlign proposes a novel platform that empowers the surgeon to make real-time, intraoperative assessments of alignment of the spine with an emphasis on minimizing disruption to the surgical workflow. Conceived by a highly interdisciplinary team of engineers, surgeons, and computer scientists, the high quality product offered by SpineAlign will improve the surgeon’s confidence during surgery, reduce the risk of postoperative misalignment, and will better enable all surgeons to achieve their desired alignment outcomes for their patient every time.