The future of endoscopic spine surgery is smaller and with improvements in navigation. Two spine surgeons share their insights.
Question: What will the next generation of endoscopic spine technology look like?
Chad Campion, MD. Campbell Clinic (Memphis, Tenn.): Everything’s going to become smaller. Right now our incisions are eight millimeters, and they’ll probably be needle-size at some point. But also the type of surgeries we’re going to do is probably going to drastically change where with a lot of the fusions we do, we’ll be able to avoid that with smaller incisions, less tissue damage, less recovery, and really maintaining or even improving motion is really where things are probably going to be headed.
Ben Burch, MD. Specialty Orthopaedics (Dawsonville, Ga.): Any advancement in scope technology is always welcome, but the scopes are already fantastic. I think the biggest step forward is going to be improvements in intraoperative navigation. I use the analogy a lot of building a ship in a bottle. That’s kind of what endoscopic spine surgery is. We’re still doing all of the work deep inside the body. We’re still doing the work at the level of the spine that you would do from a traditional surgery, but we’re doing it through very small openings. It’s like building a ship in a bottle to do that. You need to have a very good understanding of anatomy, and that requires use of things like intraoperative fluoroscopy and X-ray to triangulate and get the right angles and the right trajectories. As interoperative navigation technology advances, especially if you bring it to the ASC setting, a lot of surgeons will feel more comfortable adopting that technology and being able to see instead of just relying on 2D imaging. Navigation technology will help folks adopt this faster or easier in the future.
