Spinal injections

Spinal injections for back-pain management are carried out on a frequent basis in hospitals and radiological clinics. Currently, these procedures are performed under fluoroscopy or CT guidance in specialized interventional radiology facilities, and thus incur a major financial burden on the healthcare system. Another drawback with the current practice is patient and surgeon exposure to X-ray radiation. The goal of this research is to design a spine intervention system that uses US for guidance. This would greatly reduce the exposure of both the patient and the physician to ionizing radiation and allow the procedure to be performed outside of a specialized facility. The use of only US for guidance has its own difficulties. In particular, due to the significant level of occlusion in spinal US images, it can be difficult to accurately identify the appropriate injection site. For this reason, we consider the fusion of intraoperative US with preoperative CT as a means of guidance for spinal injections.