Praxim SA today announced that its CEO and founder, Stéphane Lavallée, received the prestigious Maurice E. Mueller Award for Excellence in Computer Assisted Orthopedic Surgery at the 2006 annual CAOS-International Meeting in Montreal. The award recognizes a career long contribution to Computer Assisted Orthopedic Surgery, with achievements that have had a fundamental effect in advancing this field of research. 'I am proud to receive such an honor and see this as an award for all the employees at Praxim who work hard every day to develop and support innovative products and technologies in this important area', Stéphane Lavallée said.

Stéphane Lavallée started his research activities in 1986 at the TIMC Laboratory in Grenoble where he co-designed a successful image-guided robot for Stereotactic Neurosurgery in 1989 and the first theoretical modeling of computer assisted surgery science (PhD 1989). In 1990 he became a researcher at the National Institute for Scientific Research in France where he pioneered the field of Computer Assisted Orthopedic Surgery and co-developed numerous inventions and clinical applications e.g. 3D to 2D image registration (1991), non-image based ACL reconstruction (1992), and statistical deformable models (1995). He has co-authored around 150 international publications and more than 15 patents. Stéphane Lavallée became CEO of Praxim in 1998. With a team of enthusiastic engineers, surgeons and researchers from Praxim, TIMC, HSS and many other research labs, innovation remains in the focus of Praxim activity resulting in breakthrough technologies like Bone Morphing®, the Praxiteles mini robot, the Praxim NanoStation®, EchoMorphing and Pikasso active spacers. Praxim won the European IST Grand Prize for Innovation in 2005.

CAOS-International (The International Society for Computer Assisted Orthopedic Surgery) is a non-profit organization founded in 2000 to bring together individuals, who, by their contributions and activities in the areas of research, clinical study and clinical use indicate interest in computer assisted orthopedic surgery. It serves as a forum for the exchange of information and promotes new partnerships between orthopedic surgeons and technologists to ensure the successful integration of computer assisted surgical tools and techniques into daily clinical routine.