Surgical lighting typically comes in one of two configurations, either sturdy mounted overheads or smaller, focused lamps strapped to the doctor’s head. Both do the job well, but also come with a set of drawbacks that can prove frustrating.
In their new joint venture with View Medical, BihlerMED aims to fill in some of the OR’s lighting gaps, both literally and figuratively.
The Surgilight is a battery powered LED surgical light attached to a flexible shaft. It comes with mounting accessories that connect it to existing overhead lighting components. It can also be attached to a bed rail or practically any other sturdy fixture within the clinical space.
The convenient maneuverability of the Surgilight allows surgeons to put illumination precisely where it’s needed.
“I think surgical lighting has always been a challenge for many doctors, and minimizing shadows is often why surgeons will wear headlights or have other fiber optic ancillary lighting options,” says Dan Coppersmith, sales and marketing manager for BihlerMED. “But what we’ve done here with our LED lighting technology and our ability to mount in unconventional places really helps surgeons get the angles that they need and minimize the shadows.”
The Surgilight can also include an optional auxiliary flexible arm to accommodate mounting of a GoPro camera. The addition provides surgical teams a simple, efficient way to generate video from procedures, capturing a variety of angles.
“The Surgilight better illuminates surgery, but also create a really good vantage point to capture video,” Coppersmith notes.
In addition to a better view of the surgical zone, the Surgilight should provide a more comfortable physical experience for surgeons. Headlights have been shown to create undue physical strain on physicians, a problem exacerbated when cameras are in the mix, too. The Surgilight eliminates that extra weight.
Sterile sleeves and other support materials are available, making the Surgilight easy to incorporate into any clinical environment. Positioning adjustment can be made smoothly in the midst of a procedure, increasingly the device’s versatility.
The beam spot size ranges from 3 inches to 6 inches, depending on positioning. And the battery provides up to 12 hours of running illumination.
Surgilight is currently being showcased at events such as the recent AAOS annual meeting and is expected to be available for purchase later in 2018.