Over 140,000 patients around the world have received Medtronic’s deep brain stimulation (DBS) therapy for neurological and psychiatric disorders. For the first time, clinicians are able to visualize patient-specific information with Medtronic’s newly CE-marked SureTune2 software to help them program or tune their patient’s DBS therapy.

DBS therapy administers mild electrical stimulation to certain regions of the brain to control the disabling symptoms of essential tremor, Parkinson’s disease, dystonia, refractory epilepsy and obsessive-compulsive disorder in Europe.

The clinician uses an external programmer to set and adjust the stimulation settings. SureTune2 helps them more efficiently select the proper stimulation setting using information such as anatomy, physiology and calculated stimulation field.
All of that patient-specific information can be viewed on the device. The users can segment structures with a grayscale threshold within the region of interest or outline the shapes of interest from a patient image.

"SureTune will have an important impact on the care of patients with deep brain stimulation because it allows me for the first time to visualize activation patterns of DBS within the individual segmented patient anatomy," Dr. Jens Volkmann, chairman and professor of neurology in the University Clinic of Würzburg, said in a statement.

"It simplifies the trial and error process associated with DBS programming by helping me identify the best contacts, which saves me time,” she added.

SureTune2 is currently not approved by the FDA for use in the U.S.

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