[IGSTK-Developers] Surgical Instruments with RFID

[Luis Ibanez]

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Technology that helps airlines keep track of baggage
and sounds an alarm when a shoplifter tries to leave the store may be
able to stop surgeons from losing a sponge inside a patient, a study
said on Monday.


Doctors at Stanford University School of Medicine who tested sponges
embedded with radio frequency identification tags said the system
accurately alerted surgeons when they deliberately left a sponge inside
a temporarily closed surgical site and waved a detector wand over it.

But they said the size of the chips used -- 20 millimeters or about 0.8
of an inch -- was too large and would need to be reduced to be practical
on sponges and surgical instruments.

Alex Macario, a physician and professor of anesthesia who led the study,
said the future probably will see a combination of tags and other
techniques such as counting instruments and sponges before and after an
operation.

"We need a system that is really fail-safe; where, regardless, of how
people use this technology, the patient doesn't leave the operating room
with a retained foreign body," he said.

The Stanford study, published in this week's Archives of Surgery,
involved eight patients. It was funded by the National Institutes of
Health and by a grant from the Small Business Innovation Research
Program, using sponges developed by ClearCount Medical Solutions Inc. in
Pittsburgh.

Macario has no financial interests in that company but two of the
study's co-authors own several patents related to tagged sponges and
work for the Pittsburgh company.

The tags use a circuit that emits an identifying a signal when prompted
by a radio signal. Such tags are widespread commercially for uses
ranging from luggage tracking and preventing currency from being
counterfeited to shoplift loss protection and automated highway toll
collection.

One earlier study found that medical personnel left foreign objects,
most often sponges, inside a patient's body in one out of every 10,000
surgeries causing complications and even death.