Robot Turns Spinal Surgery Into a Flight Simulator Game [Medicine]

Conducting surgery using robots with tiny arms cuts the chance of infection, reduces hospital stay time, and could revolutionize spinal surgery. And it makes the entire process feel rather like a game.

From the interesting advances in medicine file: An Israeli company has created small robots for spinal surgery that appear to minimize pain and complication risk for patients. Mazor Robotics’ SpineAssist robots are currently in use within the U.s.a., Germany, Russia, Israel, South Korea and a number of other countries.

SpineAssist is a small robotic arm coupled with a workstation unit that enables surgeons to map out a patient’s spinal anatomy upfront (pictured). The package also contains a clamping fixation device and special software to manipulate the robot. These are currently the only real robots specifically created for spinal surgery.

One of the robot’s finest features, Mazor CEO Ori Hadomi tells Fast Company, is how it helps surgeons avoid making deep incisions while repairing the spine. Here’s how he described the creation process:

When we were founded, we were thinking that the technology we developed can be ready to be implemented in an awfully wide variety of applications-everything from the brain to the spine to the knee. But we acknowledged that, being a small company, we need to be very focused. So we decided to highlight the world where we thought we had the greatest potential-the spinal cord.

So far, spinal implants were inserted in 2,000 different surgeries using SpineAssist. There were no cases of nerve damage, Mazor says. A newly released study inside the medical journal Spine indicates a 98% success rate in implant accuracy via SpineAssist. And a presentation at a 2010 spinal surgery conference says use of the robots reduced patients’ hospital stay by a third and resulted in a 70% reduction in misplaced implants.

Mazor’s robotics system are primarily used in cases of scoliosis and severe spinal deformities. The Dallas Morning News recently wrote on the usage of SpineAssist on scoliosis patients in Texas:

” Like a pilot in a flight simulator, I will be able to map out the patient’s spinal anatomy and perform the full procedure before the patient even arrives for surgery,” [SpineAssist co-creator Dr. Isadore] Lieberman said. ” I contribute the fundamental carpentry, just putting the screws inside the right spot.”

In addition to increasing precision, Lieberman said SpineAssist reduces a patient’s radiation exposure during surgery. Lieberman said that with SpineAssist there’s less chance of an infection, less pain after surgery, fewer complications, shorter hospital stays and quicker recovery.

” We envision this technology as ushering in a new era in spine surgeries, an identical way laparoscopies transformed general surgery within the 1990s,” said Sara Misuraca, program director of the Scoliosis & Spine Tumor Center at Texas Health Plano.”

Hadomi also compares SpineAssist to a kind of ” GPS system” for surgeons to take advantage of while inserting spinal implants.

The use of robotics for spinal surgery is, naturally, a new field. Hospitals will have to be sold on purchasing SpineAssist systems and on arranging training sessions for surgeons. Mazor is currently selling SpineAssist to hospitals for $660,000, in addition to an annual $66,000 service fee. Spinal implants marketed by the firm are also proprietary. Given the inflated costs of almost everything in healthcare, that seems a small price to pay for empirically faster and easier surgery.

[Photo courtesy Mazor Robotics]

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This post is tagged: advances in medicine, complication risk, dallas morning news, special software, spinal deformities