O-arm guided balloon kyphoplasty: preliminary experience of 16 consecutive patients

Balloon kyphoplasty is now widely used for the treatment of vertebral compression fractures. Excellent pain relief is achieved with cement injection, but the safety of the procedure relays on excellent radiological exposure. The balloon kyphoplasty technique is usually performed using one or two C-Arm devices to allow correct antero-posterior (AP) and lateral view throughout the surgical procedure. By definition, this minimal invasive spine surgery is associated with radiation exposure for both the patient and the surgeon. In our center, we recently moved from this way of proceeding to the use of an O-Arm image guidance system to perform cement augmentation in vertebral fractures. To our knowledge, there is no clinical series describing the O-arm use in a balloon kyphoplasty procedure published in the scientific literature. We prospectively evaluate on 16 consecutive patients, the feasibility of the O-Arm guided kyphoplasty procedure with the original, usual tools, and we measured the fluoroscopy time and the X-ray exposure. We didn't experience any device related problem and demonstrated a significant reduction of X-ray exposure and time of fluoroscopy. We believe that using this new intraoperative system, the overall time of surgery and fluoroscopy could still be reduced in a near future.