Tech & Health: Spine surgery goes high-tech

SURGERY MEETS ROBOTICS: HS Chhabra, medical director and chief of backbone providers, Indian Spinal Accidents Centre

Poor life-style, hectic dwelling and doubtless genetic circumstances are making spinal illnesses and deformities extra frequent than earlier than. Additionally, India data an alarmingly excessive quantity instances of spinal trauma and spinal tumours yearly. Nevertheless, working on a backbone is among the most difficult surgical procedures a surgeon can try.

HS Chhabra, a famend orthopaedic backbone surgeon and medical director cum chief of backbone providers at New Delhi-based Indian Spinal Accidents Centre (ISIC) explains the daunting process: “Because the physique’s central assist construction, the backbone has 31 pairs of spinal nerves—8 cervical, 12 thoracic, 5 lumbar, 5 sacral, and 1 coccygeal, and every pair connects the spinal wire with a particular area of the physique. When mixed with different frequent surgical and post-surgical issues, one can think about the immense threat of a backbone surgical procedure.”

Because of evolving expertise and engineering capabilites, minimally invasive backbone surgical procedures have gotten safer and extra exact than ever. With the arrival of the robotics methodology, Chhabra says that backbone surgical procedure has grow to be higher by way of affected person outcomes. “Backbone Robotics interface with O-arm is the newest development that may assist surgeons earlier than and throughout the surgical procedure and enhance outcomes and accuracy for sufferers inflicting lesser ache, selling quicker restoration and lowering the chance of a revision surgical procedure,” he says.

What’s O-arm?
The O-arm, with its patented design, gives true 360 levels 3-D imaging throughout the course of backbone surgical procedures. It’s optimised for the necessities of backbone and orthopedic surgical procedures, significantly lowering the probabilities of a revision surgical procedure. O-arm not solely gives real-time, intraoperative imaging of a affected person’s anatomy with excessive definition but in addition a big field-of-view in each two and three dimensions. The retractable O-arm can internally rotate across the affected person on an working desk in 360-degrees with 6-degrees freedom, taking a 2D or 3D picture of the world to be operated. Thus, the surgeon can visualise the affected person’s anatomy from any desired angle.

Going past high-definition real-time imaging, O-arm has different workflow advantages which make the surgeon’s job simpler, cut back stress within the OT and enhance confidence. “First, with robotic positioning system operation theatre personnel can use O-arm identical to the standard observe of a C-arm, thus making it very simple for the surgical crew,” says the highest surgeon at ISIC. “Second, the imaging time is simply 13 seconds. Additional with the selection of various dosage modes, O-arm allows probably the most optimised dose with out compromising on picture high quality. Lastly, O-arm is absolutely cell and may be simply moved from one working room to a different for concurrent use.”

Why O-arm and robotics at ISIC?
“Owing to ISIC’s popularity, we get much more sophisticated and revision instances as in comparison with a typical multi-specialty hospital. Additionally, our backbone surgical procedure volumes are fairly excessive,” says Chhabra. He explains that the second there’s any complication, the imaging must go up. Whereas the everyday pre-operation CT helps in analysis, this picture is taken with the affected person going through up and the surgical procedure is normally carried out with the affected person going through down or sideways. Consequently, even in easy issues, there’s anatomical shift, that’s, the relative place of anatomical buildings as seen in pre-operation CT is just not the identical as throughout the surgical procedure. This will make the job of a surgeon harder.

“That is the place engineering and expertise solves the issue: O-arm with Mazor X S.E. Robotic system,” he stresses.
Mainly, O-Arm when mixed with the Mazor Robotic system results in ecosystem advantages. The 2 applied sciences are designed to work collectively seamlessly. Consequently, the picture taken from O-Arm may be transferred to the robotic system on the click on of a button and the affected person registration course of is computerized. This not solely saves time but in addition removes probabilities of handbook error. Additional, because the picture is taken intra-operatively, the relative place of anatomical buildings within the picture is identical as within the affected person on the desk.

“With this picture an skilled surgical crew can shortly take advantage of optimum plan utilizing superior planning capabilities of the robotic system, execute this plan with robotic precision all of the whereas visualising with navigation options of Mazor X S.E. robotic system,” he explains. “Lastly, with O-arm we will take a confirmatory scan simply earlier than ending the surgical procedure. The place reminiscence performance allows us to robotically manoeuvre O-arm to the identical place on the contact of a button to reconfirm implant place. Consequently, we don’t want to attend for a post-op CT-scan to verify the surgical targets. If any correction is required, the identical may be carried out in the identical surgical procedure, probably avoiding revision surgical procedure.”

Surgical procedure with O-arm robotics is a large step-up not solely in bettering affected person outcomes in common surgical procedures, but in addition in advanced deformity surgical procedures, cervical backbone surgical procedures, defending important vessels in neck and lots of different advanced spinal procedures.