This is almost like having GPS for your knee surgery and this story is about a 72 year old man who underwent the procedure at a hospital in the Los
Angeles area. The robot surgery procedure is available so far at around 20 hospitals in the US. You can find a listing of surgeons who perform the robotic knee surgery here.
The procedure and product is FDA approved of course. The surgeons still have the job of mapping and planning the procedure ahead of time and you can see with the pictures below, the accuracy of navigating is enhanced. Normally only 24 hours is required in the hospital and patients are driving again within a week and walking within a day or two.
Patients are regaining quality of life without the pain with the procedure. An implant replaces lost cartilage and stops the bone on bone grinding that causes pain. The accuracy versus free hand surgery seems to be the real advantage here, again with a focus on higher success rates with precision targeting.
OR Live Surgeries, who is featured on the blog here as a reference also has a full video available to see how the entire procedure is done. The web site also had many videos available for both professionals and patients. BD
OR Live - MAKOPlasty Surgery Video
From the Website:
The robotic arm with tactile guidance adds the sense of touch, making bone resection highly precise and MAKOplasty® surgeon-friendly. The MAKO Tactile Guidance System™ is a proprietary, FDA-cleared, surgeon–interactive robotic arm system that enables the orthopedic surgeon to pre-
operatively plan the
alignment and placement of knee resurfacing implants and to intra-operatively make complex, anatomic, tissue-sparing and bone-conserving cuts accurately.
HUNTINGTON BEACH – All the years of extreme sports, scaling telephone poles and engaging in shooting competitions had finally caught up with Jack Edmondson.
While Edmondson, 72, had retired from his physically taxing job climbing telephone poles and repairing wires and no longer hit the lake for waterskiing trips, long-range rifle shooting remained a favorite extracurricular activity.
Edmondson underwent MAKOplasty surgery in January at Los Angeles-based Good Samaritan Hospital in which a robot is used rather than a surgeon's hands for a knee implant.
"There are fewer mistakes that can happen and that's the beauty of it," Edmondson said. "It's deleting the human potential for mistakes, not deleting the human part that knows what he's doing."
Good Samaritan Hospital is one of about 20 medical centers nationwide that has welcomed a robot into the operating room, said Dr. Lawrence Dorr.
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