Sonometrics Corporation has developed a patented medical guidance system to assist hospital physicians with minimally invasive medical procedures. This real-time tracking system is able to reconstruct the movement and image of objects within the body, thereby creating significant benefits for hospitals and patients alike. Currently, our technology can replace the use of continuous x-ray fluoroscopy in many catheterizations and stereotactic procedures, and will pave the way for robotic surgery in the future.

The concept for this tracking within the body is analogous to the Global Positioning Systems which can use three satellites to track the position of a particular vehicle. By putting ultrasonic crystals on the chest of a patient, and having then send and receive signals from other crystals on a particular instrument which has been inserted into the body (i.e. a catheter), we are then able to reconstruct the image of this catheter and show its movements in real time in 3-D space.

For example, when three or four crystals are placed on a steerable catheter (or some other type of probe/instrument) an image of the catheter's movements can be constructed from the known 3D coordinate positions of the crystals. These positions are re-computed a minimum of 15 times per second, thus providing the physician with "real-time" location information.

The field of Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is growing at an accelerating pace. The principal advantages of MIS is that the patient is subjected to less surgical trauma and has a dramatically reduced hospital stay, which in turn significantly reduced the operating costs of the clinical center. Current generation minimally invasive procedures have been carried out using endoscopes and long-reaching surgical tools. Typically, the patient's abdomen is inflated with carbon dioxide and the instruments are inserted through small incisions. Surgeons then perform the procedures though endoscopic visualization.

Generally minimally invasive surgical procedures can be performed only on organs that do not involve considerable bleeding, as the surgeon is oriented and guided only with his own vision. Using endoscopes in a bloody environment is not possible because blood is opaque and the majority of surgical procedures do involve trauma to tissues that bleed. Also, many procedures of the cardiovascular system are done from inside the heart and the arteries where 3D optical localization is simply impossible.

The key advantage of the Sonometrics Tracking System is its ability to overlay real-time 3-D information about the movement of catheters/probes on top of images generated in other ways (3d ultrasound, bi-plane x-ray, MRI, etc.). Of course, these other 3-d images either provide less than satisfactory image quality or give very slow real time position feedback, which is why our system is an essential component of the overall process. Please feel free to call or e-mail us if you want to discuss any of our clinical products or if you have a clinical application in mind.