SpineGuard, a company that develops and markets disposable medical devices for spine surgery, has been granted a patent by the US Patent Office for the application of its Dynamic Surgical Guidance technology for a new application: bone quality measurement.

“Because of population aging, orthopedists and neurosurgeons are treating an increasing number of osteoporotic patients, and they are expressing the need to precisely measure the bone quality.

“A widely shared opinion amongst surgeons is that the existing standard of care – known as a DEXA scan – only brings an uncertain (unreliable) answer to this growing need. This grant from the US Patent Office follows previous patent grants in China and Japan.

“It confirms the potential of SpineGuard’s DSG technology for this very promising new application,” said Pierre Jérôme, CEO and Co-founder of SpineGuard.

“We believe that the DSG technology can allow surgeons facing these skeletal pathologies to evaluate the bone density of their patients intraoperatively in a much more precise anatomical area and in doing so, to fine-tune their surgical strategy.

“For spine surgeries, this will ease the choice of the implants, their size, their diameter, their location and if cement should be used or not,” concluded Stéphane Bette, Co-founder, CTO and US General Manager of SpineGuard.

Osteoporosis represents a serious and growing healthcare issue due to population aging. Most patients with a fragility fracture are neither evaluated, nor treated for osteoporosis.

For patients being diagnosed with osteoporosis, several complications are associated with spine surgeries, and the quality of the purchase of the pedicle screws is directly linked with the bone mineral density.

Co-founded in 2009 in France and the USA by Pierre Jérôme and Stéphane Bette, SpineGuard’s mission is to make spine surgery safer by bringing real-time digital technology into the operating room.

Its primary objective is to establish its proprietary DSG (Dynamic Surgical Guidance) technology as the global standard of surgical care, starting with safer screw placement in spine surgery and then in other surgeries.