MEDICAL DEVICE INNOVATION - Medical Device Daily

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Vesticon aims for ‘victory over
vertigo’ with Epley Omniax
MEDICAL DEVICE INNOVATION 2010
By AMANDA PEDERSEN
Medical Device Daily Staff Writer
Often times when a patient suffers from vestibular
(inner ear) vertigo, a condition characterized by a specific
type of dizziness, they are told they must learn to live with
it because it is too difficult to determine which ear is causing
the problem.
Vesticon (Portland, Oregon) was founded in 2003 with
the precise mission of achieving “victory over vertigo” and
to get rid of the “learn to live with it” scenario that has
become the standard prescription for these patients. In
February the company launched its Epley Omniax system, a
software-guided patient positioning system designed to
help physicians and other care providers to accurately
diagnose and effectively treat vestibular disorders including
the most common type, known as benign paroxysmal
positional vertigo (BPPV).
Cathy Epley, president/CEO and founder of Vesticon,
told Medical Device Daily that most of the training for the
physicians who treat vertigo is in surgery, so most of the
solutions that were available were surgical and they
were incomplete solutions that were associated with a lot
of side effects.
Epley is the daughter of John Epley, MD, developer of
the now-common “Epley Maneuver” for treating BPPV and
the inventor of the Omniax. “When Dr. Epley in the 1980s
came up with this new way of treating vertigo it was revolutionary
– I don’t like to use words like that but he did
change the existing theory on how to treat it and I think
most people in the field would refer to it that way because
he took away the need for surgery,” Epley said. She was in
the cardiology field and wrote grants to develop the technology
for her father. When the Epleys got the grants, she
licensed his technology and started the company.
The Omniax derives its name from the 360-degree
multi-axial positioning it provides. According to Vesticon,
the software-driven patient positioning system uses
infrared goggles to assist caregivers in analyzing abnormal
eye movement patterns that are associated with the shifting
of loose particles in the inner-ear canals, which cause BPPV.
The system is unique, the company says, because it gives
physicians and therapists the ability to rotate patients to virtually
any position, including a 360-degree flip. The science
behind the system is derived from Dr. Epley’s “paradigmshifting
work” in the vestibular field, Vesticon said.
The Trinity Hearing & Balance Center (Trinity, Florida),
an audiology center focused on treating dizziness and balance
disorders, recently became one of just a handful of
clinics to offer the technology since its commercial launch
earlier this year. Trinity says it will have “much greater success
identifying and treating the causes of dizziness” now
that it has the Omniax. “Too often, the current standard of
care comes up short and patients are told they must live
with their condition,” said Kelly Hansen, MD, founder of
Trinity Hearing & Balance Center, in a statement. “Now that
we have the Omniax in place, the vast majority of those
cases can be resolved.”
Hansen, an audiologist of 18 years, says her main purpose
for opening the practice was to provide a “state-ofthe-art”
facility for diagnosing and treating dizziness and
balance disorders. “Now I use the Omniax with every dizzy
patient I treat,” Hansen said. “Here’s why: with one recent
patient at another office where I sometimes fill in, I performed
a table maneuver twice without success. The third
time I suggested she come to my office where I could use
the Omniax. After one treatment on the Omniax, she was
completely fixed. Of course, she was thrilled and so was I.”
According to Vesticon, the Omniax is the first device to
offer precise nystagmus-based evaluation. “It provides
caregivers unmatched ability to detect, differentiate, treat
and manage balance and dizziness disorders,” the company
said. Until now, BPPV diagnosis and treatment has
involved a significant amount of educated guesswork and,
if it is BPPV, manual maneuvers which tend to be both difficult
to accomplish and imprecise, Vesticon said. When BPPV
is diagnosed, the current standard of care is to perform the
Epley Maneuver manually, the company noted.
Epley said that balance disorders often involve loose
particles (calcium stones or crystals) in more than one
inner ear canal, or particles in a canal other than the posterior
canal. Occasionally the problem is caused by some
other issue, such as damage to the brain or a problem elsewhere
in the ear, she said.
The treatment for BPPV is usually moving the patient
around to maneuver the loose particles out of the canals
and into an area of the ear that will not be irritated, Epley
said. She compared the process to getting a rabbit down
into its hole.
Epley said the emerging literature shows that the other
canals are much more frequently where the problem is and
she says the company is getting information on the
Omniax to support that. To explain the importance of this
new literature and why the system is so important to the
diagnoses and treatment of this condition, Epley said it
would be like a cardiologist treating heart attack patients
by always only treating the left ventricle, instead of finding
out what part of the heart actually needs treatment. “Maybe
50% of the time you’d hit it and the other 50% you’d miss,”
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