Dr. Samuel Bederman and Dr. Nitin Bhatia from the UC Irvine Medical Center have performed the first robotic spinal surgery using SpineAssist, a robotic system, which enhances the precision of implant placements in the spine.
UCIrvine Medical Center
According to Dr. Bhatia, this technology would reduce the surgery time, improve outcomes and also the healing in the patients who came for spinal surgery. He reveals that they would be able to preplan a surgical procedure with the help of CT scans and accurately plot the surgery and also program the robot, which would guide screws to the correct spot in the spine of the patient. A study carried out in 2010 has confirmed that SpineAssist could enhance the accurate placement of the spinal implants by 98.3% and further reduced the rates of screws, which were misplaced, and which led to neurological problems in the patients.
Normally, spine surgeons take several X-rays during surgery for ensuring that each and every screw has been properly placed and that they don’t touch any nerve or violate the spinal canal. But now as the scans are taken before the operation and the results programmed into the robot, the surgeon can work with great speed and precision. Bhatia stated that their surgical results were excellent in the first place and hence to take on a new technology was always difficult for him. He reveals that this system however went beyond their targets for their patients and proved its veracity in treating even challenging ailments such as spondylolisthesis, spinal stenosis and scoliosis.
According to Bederman, who was a specialist in the field of spinal deformity and scoliosis, the robot would prove to be beneficial even in the treatment of spinal alignment problems, which were congenital or rose from previous spinal surgeries or even deformities that developed in adults due to tumors or arthritis or fractures.