A novel gold marker to aid intraoperative localisation during spinal surgery!

Methods of pre-operative level marking for spinal surgery include fiducial implants, coil implants, spinal needle implant, methylene blue and cement injection. We describe a novel gold marker used for preoperative spinal marking and report our experience.The notes and scans of patients who had gold marker for preoperative spinal marking over the period from June 2016 to November 2018 were analysed.

Clinical outcomes of VNS therapy with AspireSR (including cardiac-based seizure detection) at a large complex epilepsy and surgery centre.

Purpose: To compare the efficacy of AspireSR to preceding VNS battery models for battery replacements, and to determine the efficacy of the AspireSR for new implants.

Methods: Data were collected retrospectively from patients with epilepsy who had VNS AspireSR implanted over a three-year period between June 2014 and June 2017 by a single surgeon. Cases were divided into two cohorts, those in whom the VNS was a new insertion, and those in whom the VNS battery was changed from a previous model to AspireSR.