China has managed to perform the first-ever total hip replacement helped by a domestic robot. The surgery was completed at Beijing Jishuitan Hospital earlier this week. Total hip replacement, also known as arthroplasty, is a common orthopedic procedure, and as the population ages, it is expected to become even more regular.
The procedure has the hip joint replaced by a prosthetic implant, which is a hip prosthesis and can be performed both totally and hemi or half replacement. Such surgery is usually conducted to relieve arthritis pain or hip fractures.
The patient that had the surgery had suffered hip pain and limping for many years because of the endemic Kaschin-Beck condition, which ended up severe abrasion and distortion of the hip joint.
The robot-supported procedure performed by the hospital’s surgeon Zhou Yixin in Beijing replaced her total hip joint by having technological advances in choosing the ideal individualized position of the prosthesis for the patient. It also managed the implanting deviation angle by no more than one degree.
Doctors in China Performed the First-Ever Robot-Assisted Total Hip Replacement Surgery
The machine actively studied the patient’s anatomy and the spine-hip relation, then performed the individualized surgery planning precisely as intended, Zhou explained.
Because this was the country’s first surgical robot for hip replacement, it was separately created by Zhou’s team and Tinavi, a Chinese technology company that specializes in the building of orthopedic surgical machinery.
The team of doctors led by Zhou also created other intelligent surgical robots with expertise in knee joint replacement and distortion correction of lower limbs. “About 300,000 hip replacement surgeries were completed in China in 2018, with a year-on-year increase of 10 to 15 percent,” said Zhou.
He says that robot-assisted surgeries would become more common around the country and help to get more accurate and intelligent treatments for people. Robotic hip surgery also aims to address the restrictions of the human factor in surgery by promising reliable techniques of component positioning in arthroplasty surgery.