Review of IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System

Veran Medical Technologies was founded in 2003 and is focused on minimally invasive therapies that increase efficacy and efficiency while reducing risk of complication for lung cancer, liver cancer and kidney cancer patient by developing soft tissue navigation tools. The company recently relocated from Nashville, Tennessee to St. Louis, Missouri in 2007. In fact, Veran Medical has a wide array of tracking devices from universal adapters that can be applied to any vendor’s biopsy and ablation needles to its own proprietary tip-tracked biopsy needles that have localization sensors integrated at the tip of the device. Tip-tracked needles help enable very fine gauge needles to be accurately navigated. IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System is a electromagnetic localization system that does localization, placing biopsy needle in the lung, liver or kidney for the interventional radiologist that imports a CT data set, reconstruct the image, and allow the user to visualize axial, sagittal, and coronal slice represents the tip of the instrument with a process on the screen that essentially acts as “GPS for the Body.”

•    The IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System incorporates advanced auto-segmentation and proprietary design for patient tracking, which serves to eliminate the possibility of user error being introduced into the system through the process of manually selecting registration fiducials both in the image and on the patient.
•    The IG4 Plug-n-Play Delivery System uses real-time electromagnetic localization to track organ motion and deliver diagnostic biopsy needles and therapy devices.
•    The IG4 Plug-n-Play Delivery System saves time for the user via its “Plug-n-Play” features.
•    IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System has a universal adapter that attaches to any type of ablation device.
•    IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System will not only navigate but also model the burn pattern that will be delivered to find optimal placement.

•    The IG4 Plug-n-Play Delivery System has a streamlined user interface that is fully controlled by a physician interface that can be used in the sterile field that reduces procedure time while providing additional information to the physician at the point of care.
•    The advantage of the IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System is that it requires no user interaction to complete registration.
•    The IG4 Plug-n-Play Delivery System enables physicians to navigate needles without the added radiation exposure that physicians and hospital staff are subjected to by using CT Fluoro.

•    Another major benefit of the IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System is the fact that it is not limited to navigating in a single plane or on lower quality images that the CT Fluoro requires. The IG4 allows a physician to select any approach to target the lesion with its global positioning system -like accuracy for high-quality images.

Traxtal is the only direct competitor identified. IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System uses an auto registration capability where the pad is placed on the patient and the patient is scanned with the pad on it and automatically finds it. The competitor system user has input, where one touches points on the image and then touches points on the patient, not a streamlined work flow and uses more time. Additionally, the IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System uses 4D registration, does respiratory tracking, and uses temporal 4-D registration to maintain accuracy throughout the procedure while the patient is still breathing.

What differentiates Veran Medical Technologies’ 4-D registration principle from those of its competitors is that it includes an automatic 3-D spatial registration between the electromagnetic field generator and the real-time CT scans of the patient anatomy, and a temporal registration capable of determining when the patient is at the same point in the respiratory cycle as when the CT scan was acquired. This 4-D enabled patient respiratory tracking provides a key competitive advantage. While competing technologies implement traditional rigid 3-D registration algorithms, they fail to take into account the inaccuracies caused by patient motion.
Moreover, the system is capable of integrating multimodality image information and real-time navigation, which in turn increases the strength of individual imaging modalities. Also, IG4’s single shot delivery of contrast agents and subsequent navigation to it is another valuable capability.

The IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System has a 4-D tracking system with temporal registration that increases work flow, saves time and reduces radiation exposure for staff and patients. IG4 Plug-n-Play Navigation System makes staff life easier by avoiding point registration.