Technology has the power to change our lives, especially if we apply it to health. Medtronic’s Mazor Stealth Edition robot, available to the Instituto Clavel at the Hospital QuirónSalud in Barcelona, ??represents precisely that, a great advance in spinal surgery, which translates into 100% precision, greater safety for the patient and reduced of recovery time. Undoubtedly, precision is one of the most outstanding characteristics, not only of robotic surgery with Mazor, but of robotic surgery in general, but how does robotic surgery achieve this high precision?
Dr. Pablo Clavel, director and neurosurgeon at Instituto Clavel, explains it to us: “Thanks to the robot’s planning software, it proposes safe and exact trajectories. In addition, its capacity for improvement is real, since its software is based on artificial intelligence models that will gradually learn what the trajectories are depending on the case and the anatomy of the patient and proposing increasingly better trajectories. Therefore, the combination of planning and execution with maximum accuracy, thanks to robotic arms, is a great advance in spinal surgery.”
This technology is recommended for spinal pathologies that do not improve with conservative treatments, such as degenerative spinal pathologies (herniated disc, degenerative disc disease, lumbar canal stenosis, etc.), vertebral fractures, as well as spinal instability.
Medtronic’s Mazor Stealth Edition robot brings benefits to both the patient and the surgeon. The greatest benefit it brings to the surgeon is its precision, as indicated by Dr. Pablo de la Fuente, a neurosurgeon at the Clavel Institute, with his experience in the use of Mazor in the treatment of degenerative pathologies of the spine: “its main advantage is the precision that a robotic arm has versus a surgeon. Above all, in the placement of screws in patients who require fusions; mainly at the lumbar level, but also at the dorsal level and, in the future, at the cervical level”.
In the case of the patient, its advantages are manifested during surgery and in the postoperative period, as Dr. Varela explains: “the benefits of robotic surgery compared to conventional surgery for the patient are the improvement in the precision of the placement of implants, minimizing exposure to ionizing radiation, both for the patient and for the operating room staff, as well as favoring the performance of minimally invasive surgical procedures, which entails a smaller surgical incision and less blood loss. It also reduces postoperative pain, since there is less muscle retraction when manipulating deep tissues, and reduces the risks of developing adjacent segment disease or infection.”
The surgeon plans the trajectory of the implants on the patient’s CT images at the robot’s workstation:
• The patient is placed on the operating table.
• The robot is attached to the table and the patient.
• The registration and acquisition of images of the patient with the robotic arm begins.
• Mazor’s system analyzes and matches images from different modalities.
• The software guides the robotic arm, following the planning previously determined by the surgeon.
• The surgeon places the implants with the neuronavigation system in real time and guided by the Mazor robotic arm.
