Novadaq Technologies Competitive Edge

Novadaq Technologies is a company involved in the development and commercialization of medical imaging systems designed to aid surgeons in the operating room. They currently market three products cleared or approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)1 including the SPY Imaging system for use in cardiac surgery. SPY finds itself most advantageous in coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG) where the potency of a graft determines the effectiveness of the surgery. As SPY delivers unprecedented technology for such common yet critical procedures, its success is inevitable when standards within the health care system are on the rise.

Before the introduction of SPY there was no easily facilitated means of visually assessing the quality of a CABG graft during a surgery2, the most critical time. This results in a significant number of post-operative problems that could otherwise be prevented. The SPY technology uses a fluorescent indocyanine green (ICG) dye that is injected into the venous system and lit up via dispersed laser light allowing the surgeons to observe the quality of blood flow after a CABG3. The ability for SPY to display, record, replay and print the procedure in real-time offers many advantages to its competitors including X-ray angiography and transit-time flow (TTF). X-ray angiography encompasses many health concerns due to the use of radiation and is also extremely time consuming and expensive, aspects that SPY’s technology avoids. TTF, SPY’s most direct competitor, uses an intraoperative ultrasound probe to measure the volumetric rate of flow through the coronary graft and is used in about 10% of all procedures. The downfall of TTF is that any amount of blood flow will trigger a positive signal, even if the graft is 95% blocked4; a percentage that would in the future trigger health concerns. SPY visually enables the surgeon to see how the graft is performing as well as the exact areas of concern, something that TTF is incapable of. Without the use...