Spine surgery is entering an exciting time in the medtech space from an explosion of implant designs to the possibility of better standardizing care, Tan Chen, MD, said.
Dr. Chen, of Geisinger in Wilkes Barre, Pa., discussed the exciting opportunities in spinal tech for an upcoming episode of the Becker’s Spine and Orthopedics Podcast.
Note: This is an edited excerpt.
Question: What are the most exciting areas of spine technology for you?
Dr. Tan Chen: Spine surgery in the last five to 10 years is undergoing a renaissance with all these companies coming up with these new toys and devices. They’re all trying to innovate, and it kind of reminds me of when the hip and knee arthroplasty field was similar and everybody’s coming up with their own designs for the ball and stem and just trying to find what’s the best. Spine is entering that phase now, which is really exciting for me.
I see three areas of major growth for spine that I’m the most excited about. First is the idea of endoscopic spine surgery. It’s been around for a while, but only in the last five to 10 years has technology really grown. We have much better visualization and all these new techniques. We have these new expandable implants that can go down the tube to help you not only do a decompression or discectomy, but also perform an endoscopic fusion. On top of that, with all of the navigation technologies nowadays, endoscopy is here to stay.
The second area is cage design. I feel like there’s been this explosion of variability in cage design. Every company has so many different types of cages, different footprints, different materials and different expansion mechanisms. I think the fact that there are so many different options available right now means that nobody really knows what the right answer is. So everybody’s experimenting and trying to see what’s the best.
Outside of the implant space, artificial intelligence is a hot topic, and everybody’s kind of publishing on the benefits and pros and cons of AI. I think the overall consensus is still up in the air about how great AI is. But with more and more of these studies coming out, I think at some point down the line, once we have enough data, we can input patient demographics or radiographs and have AI give care recommendations. If we can get to that point, I think that would be, that’d be amazing. We can then standardize spine care. Unlike hip and knee arthroplasty, spine care has so much variability in what a spine surgeon would recommend. If you ask 10 spine surgeons for an answer, you’re going to get 11 answers. I don’t think there’s much of a consensus right now in spine surgery. At some point down the line with AI, better outcome measures and research, it’s going to become a lot more standardized.
