A novel handheld robotic-assisted system for unicompartmental knee arthroplasty: surgical technique and early survivorship.

Technology, including robotics, has been developed for use in unicompartmental knee arthroplasty (UKA) to improve accuracy and precision of bone preparation, implant positioning, and soft tissue balance. The NAVIO™ System (Smith and Nephew, Pittsburgh, PA, United States) is a handheld robotic system that assists surgeons in planning implant positioning based on an individual patient\u27s anatomy and then preparing the bone surface to accurately achieve the plan. The surgical technique is presented herein. In addition, initial results are presented for 128 patients (mean age 64.7 years; 57.8% male) undergoing UKA with NAVIO. After a mean of follow-up period of 2.3 years, overall survivorship of the knee implant was 99.2% (95% confidence interval 94.6-99.9%). There was one revision encountered during the study, which was due to persistent soft tissue pain, without evidence of loosening, subsidence, malposition or infection. These initial results suggest a greater survivorship than achieved in the same follow-up time intervals in national registries and cohort studies, though further follow-up is needed to confirm whether this difference is maintained at longer durations

A Perspective on Robotic Assistance for Knee Arthroplasty

Knee arthroplasty is used to treat patients with degenerative joint disease of the knee to reduce pain and restore the function of the joint. Although patient outcomes are generally quite good, there are still a number of patients that are dissatisfied with their procedures. Aside from implant design which has largely become standard, surgical technique is one of the main factors that determine clinical results. Therefore, a lot of effort has gone into improving surgical technique including the use of computer-aided surgery. The latest generation of orthopedic surgical tools involves the use of robotics to enhance the surgeons’ abilities to install implants more precisely and consistently. This review presents an evolution of robot-assisted surgical systems for knee replacement with an emphasis on the clinical results available in the literature. Ever since various robotic-assistance systems were developed and used clinically worldwide, studies have demonstrated that these systems are as safe as and more accurate than conventional methods of manual implantation. Robotic surgical assistance will likely result in improved surgical technique and improved clinical results

MENISCECTOMIZED KNEES REGAIN NORMAL WALKING FLEXION RANGE OF MOTION WITH TIME PAST SURGERY

INTRODUCTION Meniscal tears are one of the most common knee injuries with an incidence rate of 60-70 per 100,000 person-years METHODS Six patients with unilateral partial medial mensciectomy were enrolled and their gait was measured at 6.2±2.7 months (mean±SD) and again at 31.8±2.5 months post-operation. At baseline, subject demographics were: age 36.0±7.5 years, height 180.3±6.0 cm, weight 79.4±10.3 kg, one female. All patients had no other knee ligament or articular injury or surgery and could walk without pain. Patients signed Institutional Review Board-approved consent documents. A group of 23 healthy age-, height-, and weight-matched control subjects were used for comparison; one randomly chosen limb was tested for each control subject. All participants were asked to perform several walking trials at a self-selected normal speed and an eight-camera optoelectronic motion capture system (Qualysis Medical AB) was used to determine knee flexion angle during gait following a previously described metho