It is fairly concentrated at the top: five assignees hold 261 of the 554 records in scope, or 47.1% of the field, and the single leading assignee holds 101 records on its own. By the tenth-ranked assignee the count has already dropped to 13, and the ranking runs to 100 companies in total, most holding only a handful of filings each. Practically, this means a freedom-to-operate review should prioritise the small group at the top before working through the long tail.

Filing activity has been steady rather than dramatically rising or falling. The last fully comparable window, 2021 to 2024, shows growth from 17 to 18 filings, a 6% increase, after a peak of 37 filings in 2019. Figures for 2025 and 2026 look lower, but publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months, so those recent years are still filling in and should not be read as a decline.

A61B, covering diagnosis and surgery, appears in 73.6% of the 554 records and is the core class for this field, followed by A61F implants and prostheses at 28.0% and A61L sterilising equipment at 17.3%. A smaller but notable cluster sits in imaging and data classes — G06T image data processing at 11.9%, G06F digital data processing at 7.6%, and H04N pictorial communication at 7.2% — reflecting the growing overlap between mechanical reduction hardware and image-guided surgery. Anyone drafting claims in this space should search across both the mechanical and imaging classes rather than treating them as separate fields.