We do have time for questions now, if there are any questions for our presenters. I have a question for Dr. Hussain. There's two questions. Why was a trans psoas approach selected as opposed to what we would expect the clinical setting we'd use, which would be a posterior lateral approach for a microdiscectomy? So for sheep, the spinal cord actually extends down to the S2 level. So therefore, a posterior lateral approach would require significant retraction on the spinal cord, which could cause spinal cord injury. The other reason, not using a trans psoas approach, again, as in humans, the femoral nerve runs through the psoas muscle, and so our ability to use neuromonitoring was limited with an experimental animal study. So the presoas approach allowed us to do essentially a variation of this approach to get to the same point in the lateral aspect of the spine without those other adjuncts that we would normally use. And the second question is, you mentioned that there's cell survival on the gel. How did you establish that cell survival? That was based on in vitro studies that we had performed prior to implanting them in the sheep, and it was based on doing various fluorescently labeled immunoassays that were done by our colleagues in the engineering group at Cornell. Any other questions for our presenters? A question for Dr. Gandhi. You mentioned all of this is being done percutaneous. The case that was demonstrated showed pedicle screws. So is there any issues with wound healing? Because we're always concerned about taking a patient with metastatic disease and when can they start the external beam radiation or stereotactic radiation. Intuitively, I would think that if you're having radiation from the inside out, it would have less of an implication on wound healing. Has that been the experience with your... That's one of the benefits of this procedure, in that you don't have to worry about the patient undergoing radiation therapy after the kyphoplasty or open stabilization procedure. Therefore, the only delay is you have a patient that's anywhere from one to two weeks delay until their systemic immunotherapy or chemotherapy is restarted. As far as the patient that you mentioned that had the pedicle screws placed, that patient had a stabilization procedure done and then several months later developed new metastatic disease at a level below and would elect to do this kyphoplasty procedure or IRT procedure. So none of the patients in your series actually had an open surgery in conjunction with this that would determine whether or not there was a wound healing issue. That's correct. So all the patients that underwent this procedure essentially had percutaneous approaches. It would be interesting to see if, in fact, this technique would allow for or does anything to wound healing. That would be good to look at. Okay, thank you to our presenters.

trans psoas approach

microdiscectomy

spinal cord injury

wound healing

percutaneous procedures