Our Story: Making Thyroid Surgery Safer
10s of 1000s of people – our friends, family, and loved ones- with thyroid cancer in the United States have their parathyroid glands accidently removed or injured during their thyroid surgery. This surgical error often causes patients to suffer from hypocalcemia complications after their surgery. This means that they may have to stay longer at the hospital, take supplements every day for the rest of their life, and have a shorter life span.
We talked to head and neck surgeons who expressed that they had difficulty visualizing the parathyroid glands (PGs) during their surgeries because of the PGs small size and similar appearance to surrounding tissues, such as lymph nodes, fat, and thyroid tissue. Another pain point was their inability to accurately assess the vascularization and perfusion of the PGs – a crucial step in preserving the glands during the surgery.
After our stakeholder interviews, we asked ourselves: how can we prevent postoperative hypocalcemia and hypoparathyroidism? What’s being done today? We learned that intraoperative identification and blood perfusion assessment of PGs are implemented as standard practice in thyroidectomies. Frozen section biopsy, a 30–50-minute procedure that allows a pathological examination of fresh samples, is not reliable as it could lead to the devascularization and destruction of functional PGs. Surgeons can also inject a dye, such as indocyanine green (ICG), to perform imaging, but this method is temporally limited and interferes with the surgical workflow.
Clinicians worldwide continue to voice concern that no affordable, suitable device currently exists to effectively preserve parathyroid function. This ongoing feedback validates both the clinical urgency and the commercial opportunity to innovate.
Advancing Surgical Vision
Optosurgical develops technologies that enhance how surgeons see during minimally invasive procedures. Our platform integrates advanced imaging hardware, intelligent software, and molecular visualization technologies to improve spatial perception, anatomical identification, and surgical precision.
Our Technology, the hANDY-i
The hANDY-i is at the bedside, ready to be used whenever it is needed. Continuous, non-invasive visualization gives the surgeon the ability to treat the patient with confidence.
Faster and more accurate visualization of the parathyroids will decrease the total operating time. Patients can go home to their loved ones even faster now.
Dye free perfusion assessment will be seamlessly integrated into the clinical workflow, giving surgeons critical information in real-time.
We recently showed 94% device identification accuracy in early feasibility studies at Johns Hopkins Hospital¹
We are accelerating and innovating our technology both in benchtop and clinical testing. Our group was one of the first to show successful feasibility of machine learning and deep learning applications to parathyroid visualization¹