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Landmark in European Co-operation
Landmark Surgical has taken part in a successful European research project to improve the design of implants and instruments for hip surgery.
The project, known as ENHIP, began in September 2005 and was co-ordinated by the highly respected IBV Research Centre in Valencia, where the team used their expertise in ergonomics to make design improvements.
By using information provided by a group of expert orthopaedic surgeons across Europe, the implants and instruments were refined so that the needs of surgeons performing both traditional and minimally invasive hip surgery could be better met.
Many surgeons working in this area had reported some degree of strain while performing this surgery and the ENHIP team of surgeons, European companies and two European research centres worked together in an attempt to identify the causes of the strain and use innovative design ideas in order to improve the instruments.
The ENHIP team worked together on this two year long CRAFT project, which was co-funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme.
The group of European companies involved in the research were:
Lafitt S.A (Spain); Artur Salgado, LDA (Portugal); Vichy Biomaterials (France);
Evolutis (France); Erothitan (Germany) and Landmark Surgical (UK).
The two Research Centres were IBV (Spain) and KOMAG (Poland) who by using their different but complementary areas of expertise and technology were able to film and analyse the movements of surgeons as they performed real-life surgery at two hospitals: Hospital De Sagunto (Spain) and Silesian Medical University (Poland).
Armed with this valuable information, the ergonomic designers proposed improvements, which were prototyped and assessed for their ability to meet the demands of the surgeons while still being able to meet strict mechanical and functional requirements.
Landmark Surgical was able to help the project by asking UK surgeons about their experiences with Orthopaedic instruments, participating in the design and manufacturing process and contributed to rapid prototyping material supplier search, material selection and CAD file adaptation to rapid prototyping technologies.
Landmark are now looking forward to adding the improved instruments to their existing range of high quality surgical instruments.