Patent granted for optical monitoring of spinal cord

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued the patent 14/364,533 on a new device and method to monitor spinal cord hemodynamics with diffuse optics. The patent was a collaboration between our lab with Prof. Arjun Yodh at the University of Pennsylvania and Prof. Thomas Floyd at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and holds a huge potential to decrease secondary injury due to surgical procedures during spinal cord. In the US, ~42% of patients submitted to surgery had a chance to become paraplegic due to spine ischemia. Our method proposes to detect such ischemic events in real time and fix it while there is time. The initial proof of concept has been published in PLOS One and in Anesthesiology.

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