The project’s goal is to develop a specialized testing system for evaluating the wear and durability of surgical instruments crafted by NuVasive. This system includes a uniaxial testing machine and an interface for precise durability assessment. Our goal is to address the lack of data on the non-standard wear experienced by surgical instruments. By researching these conditions, we aim to better understand their impact on various instruments. Additionally, we seek to minimize errors in instruments to improve the surgical process for real-time patient surgeries. This will boost confidence among medical staff, simplify operations, and ultimately enhance surgical performance and patient safety. Our overarching objective is to refine surgical instrument designs, ensure their sustainability and safety, and prevent potential damage during diverse operations.
In the short term, our project addresses the immediate needs of NuVasive's product engineering team, providing them with a versatile testing system capable of accommodating various instrument materials and designs. This enables proactive wear testing, enhancing the development process and expediting product approval. Over the long term, the primary beneficiaries are the patients themselves. With over 300,000 XLIF procedures conducted in the past two decades and a substantial population suffering from chronic back pain, the significance of reliable surgical instruments cannot be overstated. By ensuring the sustainability and safety of NuVasive's products, our project directly contributes to improving patient outcomes and reducing surgical risks.
Currently, the mechanisms of non-standard wear during a surgical instrument’s lifetime remain unclear. In order to elucidate the role of these different wear processes and estimate instrument lifetime, we hope to build a wear testing platform that can simulate and test these conditions. This platform, capable of simulating different motions, will help to better characterize these wears by addressing the scarcity of data and in the future contribute to improvements on the design, development, and safety of Nuvasive technologies.