The next advancements in endoscopic spine surgery that physicians should anticipate include improvements in instruments and the incorporation of regenerative medicine.
Sanjay Konakondla, MD, and Albert Telfeian, MD, PhD, who operate New York City-based Endoscopic Spine Institute of New York, spoke with Becker’s about their outlook.
Note: This conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Question: What are the most exciting areas of endoscopic spine technology? What do you think the next generation of endoscopic spine technology will look like?
Dr. Sanjay Konakondla: Everything is super exciting. As far as the 3D optical display, AR and VR, that’s a space that I think will have some particular advantages. AI with automatically marking and labeling spots for remote teaching and learning and education will be huge because all of a sudden you give access to technique and education to less fortunate areas across the globe. Global outreach is a big void currently in endoscopic spine.
Drills also need to be advanced. The benefits of the angled scopes is that you can look around corners. The problem is a lot of our instruments don’t reach around corners. I think that’s a big opportunity for the industry. The fusion world is going to be exposed to endoscopes. It’s only a matter of time. But I don’t think anyone has solved the ship in a bottle dilemma there for interbody fusions and graft delivery systems.
Dr. Albert Telfeian: We’re doing it and marrying it with regenerative medicine. I recently worked with somebody all morning doing stem cells and talked about how we can renew, restore and prevent further decay for discs and joints. People used to do surgery for people who had gastric ulcers and then they figured out it was a bacteria. I think this is going to happen in spine surgery where we’re going to really be able to make that big leap. Nobody has their knees fused. Why are we doing that with spines?
