By Janki Patel
For WisBusiness.com
Surgery to remove cancerous tissue is often less than 100 percent successful. In fact, tumorous tissue is left behind in 30 to 50 percent of brain surgeries, which can lead to recurrence, disease progression and death.
In the case of radiation-based treatment for cancer, healthy tissue is often sacrificed since tumors change and move. The exact spot can’t always be targeted.
And in surgical cases that require restoration of blood flow, angiograph systems in place today can’t determine if blood flow has been restored to the whole heart or brain. How can these uncertainties in current surgical methods be addressed?
Milwaukee-based MedTrak LLC is devising a system to enable radiologic imaging during crucial moments of surgery. Using this system, surgeons can avoid closing up a patient, running medical images later that discover a problem, and needing to re-open the patient.
The key component in MedTrak’s solution is moving the patient from the procedure room to a connected imaging room while providing continuous anesthesia. The tabletop for the patient is unique because it provides both imaging and surgical requirements. It can supply power to monitoring equipment and gas to the anesthesia simultaneously during patient transfer. The tabletop is mounted to ceiling rails and electronic speed control is what moves the tabletop.
Implementing MedTrak’s system has economic benefits for a hospital.
“Neurosurgeries are some of the highest revenue cases,” said Steve Hushek, the company founder and Ph.D. graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hushek has 25 years of experience in the field as the Lead System Designer of GE Healthcare’s intraoperative MRI program. Neurosurgeries can average from $50,000 to $150,000 in costs. Hushek estimates the global market exceeds 5,200 systems, or more than $9 billion.
MedTrak is not only about economic benefits. Hushek described a case in which a 2- year-old boy was spared a grueling procedure because of the ability to get images during the middle of his surgery. He had a tumor behind his eye, and the traditional procedure is a temple-to-temple cut in the skull to reach the tumor. That’s followed by a week-long hospital stay. Being able to see images of the tumor during surgery, the surgeon saw the tumor was operable through the eye socket without cutting eye nerves and muscles. They got the tumor out, and the boy was able to leave in 24 hours with only seven stitches by his eye instead of stitches from opening his skull.
“The take-away is that imaging during surgery opens a whole new door for surgeries. Here, a little boy didn’t have to go through having the bone in his skull cut and was able to leave the hospital the next day,” Hushek said.
Along with Hushek, the company has a clinical advisory board with experts from Harvard, MD Anderson Cancer Center and The Mayo Clinic. “The Corporate Advisory Board has a financial expert/angel investor, a former hospital CEO and has openings intended for representatives of major investing groups,” explained Hushek.
Medtrak achieved Wisconsin’s Qualified New Business Venture status, yielding a 25 percent tax credit for potential investors, and qualified for a $250,000 loan from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. The company received its first patent in October and has filed for another.
— Patel is a student in the UW-Madison Department of Life Sciences Communication.
