Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Heavy Duty - October 2016 - Subscribe to Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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Orthopedic Image Guidance and Robotic Systems Navigation can turn good hip and knee replacements into great ones. I n hip and knee replacement surgery, the more precise you are, the more successful your outcomes will be. An experienced sur- geon can expect perfect placement of the acetabular cup and femoral stem, for example, about 80% to 85% of the time. That's not bad. With the help of navigation technology, however, that percentage can climb to the high 90s. Since joint replacements are likely to sky- rocket over the next couple of decades, that increased precision could translate into a lot of patient benefit. Precision is the chief selling point of orthopedic image guidance and robotic-assisted surgical systems. Image-guided navigation employs pre- operative CT scans and/or intra-operative infrared or ultrasound regis- tration to verify anatomy and guide instruments. Robotic arms are pro- grammed with reaming, burring and sawing parameters and tactile feed- back constraints that prevent users from diverting from them. Both offer the assurance that you're in the right place, doing the right thing and less prone to error. The accurate implant alignment that they bring to the OR table can provide the patient with more natural feeling in the joint after surgery and can reduce early dislocation. It can make arthroplasty outcomes highly reliable, especially in anatomically complex primary or revision cases. In short, the technologies let the surgeons who master their learning curves deliver not just good results, but great ones. That's what we know now, anyway. If orthopedic image guidance and robotics have any caveat, it's that we don't know for sure whether accuracy's advantages will pay off in long-term functional outcomes, such as improved longevity of the joint prosthesis. We've only had robots aiding in hips and knees for about 5 years, and image-guided 1 1 0 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • M A Y 2 0 1 6 Thinking of Buying … Bradford S. Waddell, MD

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