An article, published in Orthopedics, examines robotic-assisted surgery and how it aims to improve total knee arthroplasty.
Here are five key notes:
1. Robotic-assisted surgery aims to improve TKA by enhancing the surgeon's ability to optimize soft tissue balancing, reproduce alignment and restore normal knee kinematics.
2. A review of previous designs and clinical studies demonstrates that robotic systems decrease variability and increase surgeon precision.
3. Design objectives for future robot-assisted surgery include preoperative planning, intraoperative sensors, augmenting surgical instrumentation and biomimetic surfaces that will be used to re-create the four-bar linkage system in the knee.
4. Future objectives also include placing implants in such a way that the knee functions with a medial pivot, lateral rollback, screw home mechanism and patellar femoral tracking.
5. Soft tissue balancing will be used for more than equalizing the flexion and extension gaps and will help match the kinematics to a normal knee.