Touch Probe Method of Orthopedic Implant Identification

Orthopedic implants are a type of joint implant such as knee and hip implant to replace the severely injured or diseased joints for people who suffer from joint problems and bring those people back to a normal life. The total number of knee and hip replacement surgeries per year in US keeps increasing in the recent years and will hit 3.48 million in 20 years. However, once the implant replacement surgery is finished, doctors and surgeons have difficulty to observe and obtain the detailed information of the implant. Existing methods for implant identification suffer from several drawbacks. First, the information is not stored on the implant but somewhere else, which can raise the risk of data loss or counterfeiting. Second, most hospitals use paper based archives to keep the patient history whose management is a huge cost. Third, it takes much time to search for the implant and patient information, which does not only increase the risk of mistakes but also increases the cost. Aiming at providing an efficient and accurate way for orthopedic implant identification to reduce time and cost, a method of using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, a wire- less radio frequency communication technology, for orthopedic implant identification has been proposed.