Millions of Americans deal with back and neck pain every day. Spinal injections can help but it takes precision and experience for doctors to get it right. Now a new medical device called AsTris 1.0 is on the market and it’s designed to help doctors get the experience they need without having to practice on a real person. The newly patented AsTris 1.0 makes its debut this week in Dallas at the 2016 American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians (ASIPP) conference April 14-16 at the Hyatt Regency.
For pain management doctors Johnny East and Brandon Knutson, owners of BioTras, the product launch of AsTris 1.0 at ASIPP is the culmination of several years of vision casting, research and design.
“As an emerging med-tech company based in Dallas, this is the perfect venue to launch our first medical device,” said East, who is board certified in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Pain Medicine and has performed over 20,000 spinal injections over the course of his 14-year career. “We will get the chance to showcase AsTris 1.0 in front of thousands of the best minds in interventional pain management, including physicians, nurses and other health care providers.”
The AsTris 1.0 body is clear, which allows the practitioner to observe needle movement as the needle is advanced towards the spine. It can also be customized to include a variety of skeletal structures to meet a wider scope of training needs. The simulator is different than anything currently on the market and is made of a fusable thermo plastic material. It is also made of re-constructed human vertebrae, and other real bone elements that can be viewed under X-ray.
“AsTris 1.0 will change how pain management training is done,” said Knutson. “It allows resident physicians, fellows, post-grad physicians and other health care professionals to practice performing hundreds, even thousands of injections before ever injecting a real person.”
BioTras expects the second and third generation models of AsTris 1.0 to be used in training for specialties outside of pain management such as neurosurgery and orthopedic surgery. You can see AsTris 1.0 spine simulator model at booth 700 at the ASIPP conference as well as videos of the spinal injection process and interviews with the inventors, East and Knutson.
Based in Dallas, BioTras is an emerging med-tech company that focuses on the development of bio-anatomical training systems. For more information on BioTras and the AsTris 1.0, go to www.biotras.com or call (214) 444-3117. Photos and a video demonstration of AsTris 1.0 can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/hcba7aa
The American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians (ASIPP) supports the needs of physicians who practice Interventional Pain Management through its pursuit of excellence in educational programs, publications, certification and political advocacy. ASIPP was formed in 1998 with the goal of promoting the development and practice of safe, high quality, yet cost effective interventional pain management techniques for the diagnosis and treatment of pain and related disorders, and to ensure patient access to these interventions.