Michael Carrel
Analyst · Stifel.
Great question, and you're right. I think the instant response you get from physicians and not just physicians, but also people that care for the patients after they go out of surgery in the ICU floor, the nurses, the PAs and others is instant gratification because they see the patients recovering more quickly, they can breathe more easily and they can kind of get up and walk around. That's really, really important towards the recovery, especially in many of these different thoracic cases. So I think that's a common theme that we hear from people all the time, which is just a dramatic and immediate impact they sense. As it relates to the overall market, the overall market in the U.S. is about 140,000 to 150,000 thoracic procedures every year. That number is growing. We'll do about 16,000 to 18,000 or so of those cases this year. So as you can tell, we're really not even -- we're just over 10% or so penetrated into the space. We think that number can obviously grow quite dramatically because of the impact that we can have. And so one is, yes, we've got a lot of room for growth just within the thoracic part of our business, both going deeper into the accounts, 500 accounts. There are more accounts that we can get into. But a lot of this is getting even deeper within the accounts that we have today as well and then kind of sharing it across more thoracic surgeons that might be in an area. Number two is, I kind of briefly mentioned it that as we think about how do we expand it, we're already thinking about new markets for the technology, in particular, sternotomy. And we anticipate that some time probably mid-to-late next year that you might be -- we'll be able to kind of maybe roll something out a little bit more aggressively into that area. That probably won't have much impact on 2023 revenue, but we do anticipate that that will expand the market quite dramatically '24 and beyond. Think about sternotomies, it's about 250,000 or so of them in the U.S. alone, 600,000-plus on a global basis. So when you start to do the math and the benefits that could be there, it's a very large market opportunity for us. We're just at the beginning stages of kind of learning a little bit more about it. And hopefully, middle part of next year, we'll be able to roll something out more officially.