Knee osteotomy is an orthopedic surgical procedure that entails the addition or removal of a bone wedge to shift body weight from a damaged joint. It is a procedure that enables patients to keep their native knee for longer or even permanently, which translates into a better quality of life for patients. However, hospitals, and specifically their surgeons, face a major challenge regarding this procedure: osteotomies around the knee are very complex to plan and to execute. The steps and metrics for this procedure are very hard to predict during the pre-operative efforts when it is done manually or even with the use of visualization software. This reported difficulty greatly increases the risks of the procedure due to the many variables not easy to anticipate before the patient is in surgery, which makes surgeons to sometimes opt for an easier-to-perform surgery that implies less risks, such as joint replacement, which translates into loss of native knee joint, revisions every 10-15 years, loss of patient’s mobility and physical capabilities, and excessive costs for hospitals - joint replacement is a considerable more expensive procedure, due to the costs associated with implants, sterilization, hospital stays and inventory management, which, in addition, also contributes to environmental pollution.
Considering this major challenge, PeekMed® has developed an automatic and accurate pre-operative planning system: the innovative AI-based PeekMed-Auto module, the first product enabling fully automatic pre-operative planning of osteotomies around the knee. Following existing and upcoming guidelines, PeekMed-Auto offers a fast and easy-to-use tool which is able to perform the pre-operative planning with a great level of accuracy and safety, reducing the margin for errors and miscalculations and the time of the planning to only a few seconds. PeekMed-Auto combines the latest advances in image processing, deep learning and artificial intelligence and is based on a successful manual version that has gained strong market traction. PeekMed-Auto allows the surgeon to provide a customized treatment that translates into fewer complications following surgery and reduced chance for re-hospitalization and second surgery.
PeekMed-Auto allows increased hospital efficiency since it empowers surgeons to opt for a more complex procedure that is considerably less expensive than joint replacement and with considerably better patient outcomes. Moreover, given PeekMed-Auto’s capability to plan the most complex surgery in a matter of seconds, it allows surgeons to use their time on other issues of the surgery or in other patients. In addition to the pre-operative planning, the system exports a report with the surgery’s plan, including 3D models, which can be shared with the surgical team and used during surgery and can be integrated with other systems, such as robotics, patient-specific instruments and navigation systems. This enhances ease of use and makes PeekMed-Auto highly applicable in a real world/clinical setting. In summary, by digitizing the whole process of planning and communication, PeekMed-Auto provides better health at lower cost and risk.
