May 14, 2007 — Royal Philips Electronics today announced at the 2007 World Conference on Interventional Oncology in Washington, D.C., that it has collaborated with Traxtal Inc. to deliver integrated soft tissue therapeutic and diagnostic navigation solutions.
The alliance combines Philips’ expertise in diagnostic and interventional imaging with Traxtal’s history of innovative product development in surgical navigation and therapy. The two companies plan to use Traxtal’s PercuNav system to create the most advanced soft-tissue navigation systems on the market. Philips and Traxtal researchers are working with multiple modalities, including ultrasound, CT and MR to develop a technology offering that has the potential to improve patient outcomes and treatment accuracy through improved visualization, as well as to realize possible cost savings as procedures can be done more efficiently.
The Traxtal PercuNav system provides advanced navigation solutions for interventional radiologists performing image-guided percutaneous diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, such as biopsies and radio-frequency ablations. FDA 510K cleared in 2006 and introduced to the market earlier this year, PercuNav helps physicians guide minimally invasive devices such as needles and probes into the body using electromagnetic tracking technology. The system provides physicians with three-dimensional visualization showing the tool position superimposed on the patient’s medical images. PercuNav also provides multimodality image fusion for combining ultrasound, CT and MR images in real-time during the interventional procedure.