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The problem with joint fractures is that you've got to put the pieces of the joint back perfectly
in order to make the joint work. Now to do that the surgeon will make a very big incision
around the joint so that he can see the individual bits of the joint. Now of course, big incisions
are not a good thing for the patient, they involve the patient being in hospital for
a long time, they are very painful and sometimes, if the wound breaks down, the result can be
less than good. In surgery there is a big move now from open
surgery to minimally invasive surgery so it is less trauma, faster recovery, less cost
to the NHS and this is what we hope to do accurately enough, in a minimally invasive
way. Our concept is that a robot would be able
to grab the individual pieces of the joint and put them back together perfectly, without
the surgeon having to make a big incision, and that would be better for the patient and
it would also be considerably less costly and is likely to have better outcomes.
The robot will be able to accurately put the fragments back together.
So it is a robotic system that has two imaging systems. One is a CT image of the fracture,
or X-Ray image, which is something that is part of the surgical work flow anyway and
there is also an external position system. So we attach the robots to the fragments of
the fracture and we use the external imaging system, in conjunction with the CT to determine
where the tools are in real time, so this allows us accurate positioning of the tools
as they start moving independently for each robot.
In order to understand the surgical workflow, in order to understand all the details about
this, which is very complex surgery, we need input from the surgeons. We need, really,
to understand what problems they encounter in this type of surgery, how they can interact
with the system, as they will be, inevitably, present in the operating theatre and all the functional
requirements of the systems. I don't think we can design something that they will use,
without them collaborating closely with us. I can have the ideas as to how you might manage
a fracture in this way and I can say to the roboticists, look, this is my concept, and
they have to turn it into a reality so the collaboration the close collaboration is absolutely
essential.