In many surgical procedures, screws or other types of fasteners are utilized to hold pieces of a patient's anatomy together in conjunction with other structural pieces, such as plates or flanges. When using these screws or other fasteners in these procedures, it is imperative that the fasteners be properly positioned in order to achieve the proper result from the procedure. Thus, often the physician will use wire guides to indicate where a particular fastener will be positioned prior to actually securing the fastener to the patient to ensure that the fastener is in the proper location.
To utilize these guide wires, a number of different types of devices are employed to properly hold the wires while the wires are positioned within the patient, as well as to engage or remove the wires from the patient. However, prior art devices used for this purpose utilize complex locking mechanisms to securely hold the wire, such as three jaw collets, or rotatable chucks, which can often make the tools difficult to use, especially during delicate surgical procedures.
Therefore, it is desirable to develop a tool that can be used to hold, engage and remove the wire that includes a wire engagement mechanism that enables the wire to be either grasped and held or released by the tool in a simple and easy to employ manner.