UC Irvine doctors perform West Coast’s first
robotic surgery on spine

Technology increases precision, enhances healing and improves results

UC Irvine Medical Center’s Dr. Nitin Bhatia and Dr. Samuel Bederman have conducted the first robot-assisted spinal surgery on the West Coast.

They utilized the SpineAssist® to increase the precision of spinal implant placement in a Los Angeles woman who had undergone two previous operations, including a spinal fusion in 2007 to treat a degenerative disk. She had developed another herniated disk in her lower back that caused pain and sciatica. The goal of the SpineAssist procedure – a spinal fusion performed with screws and grafts – was to alleviate her discomfort and stabilize the spine.

SpineAssist® is a specially-designed robotic guidance system which enables surgeons to perform safer and more accurate spine surgeries. For patients, this means better clinical outcomes with less pain, fewer complications, and shorter recovery time. SpineAssist has been in daily use in leading hospitals with thousands of successful cases worldwide.

SpineAssist is transforming back surgery by advancing surgical techniques from freehand method to state-of-the art, guided procedures.

The SpineAssist Robotic Guidance System has 2 key components:

1. SpineAssist Workstation - allows surgeons to pre-plan optimal procedures in 3 dimensions according to the patient’s individual anatomy, creating a “surgical blueprint”.
2. SpineAssist Robotic Arm - guides the surgeon during surgery to perform the preoperative plan therefore optimizing clinical outcome.

The system also lessens radiation exposure for the patient, surgeon and entire operating-room team. Traditionally, spine surgeons must take dozens of X-rays during a procedure to ensure that each screw is properly located and doesn’t impinge on nerves or breach the spinal canal. Since the robot is programmed based on scans prior to an operation, the physician can work more quickly, with greater precision and fewer X-ray fluoroscope images. The UC Irvine Orthopedic Spine Team has performed more robotic spine surgeries than any other practice in the western United States.

"This technology can improve outcomes, shorten surgical times and enhance healing in our spinal surgery patients," said Bhatia, UC Irvine’s chief of orthopaedic spine surgery. "The system allows us to preplan an operation using CT scans to precisely plot the surgery and program the robot to guide screws in exactly the right spot in the patient's spine."