Our Study at HSS Finds Knee Replacement with Robotic Assistance Leads to Lower Complication Rate
These days you hear a lot about the use of robotics in joint replacement and other surgical procedures. Many orthopedic surgeons who perform robot-assisted surgery find that it improves the accuracy and predictability of a knee or hip replacement. Indeed, the use of computer-assisted navigation and robotic assistance for total knee replacement has grown tremendously over the past few years and shows no sign of slowing down. Among American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons attending the 2020 annual meeting, 77% of respondents indicated that they used technology in their surgical cases. The most common reason they cited was to increase surgical precision. A large study we undertook at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) found another major advantage of using a robot. Accessing and analyzing a huge national database with information on more than one million knee replacement patients, we found that surgery performed with robotic assistance led to a lower complication rate in the fir...