Surgical instruments with electronic serial numbers
Be it a heart transplant or a caesarean section, every operation requires a wide variety of surgical instruments, from simple retractors, clamps, scalpels and scissors to more specialist devices such as cerclage wire passers, which surgeons employ to repair long, oblique fractures in bones. These are shaped in such a way as to half encircle the broken bone, and incorporate a hollow channel. In a process not unlike stringing a parcel for posting, thread or wire is fed through the channel around the damaged bone and then knotted in place, both to support the bone and to hold the broken parts together. 'Until now, it has always been time-consuming and expensive to manufacture surgical instruments featuring this kind of channel,' says Claus Aumund-Kopp of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials IFAM in Bremen. Because it is nigh-on impossible to machine curved channels, shaped tubes have traditionally had...