Diqing, China --- Five successive cases of robot-assisted TKA have been successfully completed recently in the People's Hospital of Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture with Honghu Orthopedic Surgical Robot ("Honghu") independently developed by MicroPort NaviBot（Suzhou）Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Shanghai MicroPort MedBot (Group) Co., Ltd. The surgeries were performed by Zhui Lu and his team, director of Orthopedics Department of the People's Hospital of Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, and Professor Chuan Li of No. 920 Hospital. Honghu-assisted total knee arthroplasty (TKA) has short learning curve, and its robotic arm ensures strong stability and high-accuracy during the surgery, enhancing the confidence of operators. The Orthopedics Department of the hospital is one of the multi-center research teams of MicroPort^®   MedBot^®  in Yunnan Province. Its success of five consecutive operations has verified the stability and reliability of Honghu, and testified the team's ability of rapid remote deployment and intensive operation.

One of the cases is a 67-year-old woman with rheumatoid arthritis in the left knee joint for over 20 years. She had suffered the pain of knee arthritis all the year round, which seriously affected her daily life and walking.

The relatively complicated conditions and severe rheumatoid arthritis of the patient added difficulty to the surgery. Before the operation, Doctor Chuan Li worked out a careful surgical plan with the surgical team of the People's Hospital of Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, and decided to adopt Honghu to assist in the TKA, and made a personalized surgical solution by performing CT 3D reconstruction of knee joint for patients with Honghu. As the tibial plateau bone mass was lost, the conventionally-planned 8mm osteotomy was reduced by 2mm when planning the platform osteotomy customizedly to avoid excessive resection. The human-computer interactive surgical platform of Honghu(Honghu HCI Platform) guided the robotic arm registration and bone registration nimbly during the surgery, the robotic arms accurately moved to the expected planned position. Compatible with the MicroPort^® Orthopedics medial-pivot knee system, the whole operation was completed smoothly and efficiently.

Postoperative measurement shows that the actual osteotomy is completely consistent with the planned value. The patient recovered fast after the operation, and the full-length radiograph of the lower limb showed that the force line had been accurately restored, which proved the precise characteristics of Honghu.

Zhui Lu, Director of the Orthopedics Department, said: "Compared with the traditional surgery, the 3D preoperative planning function of robot is powerful, allowing doctors to collect more patient information during surgery and implant the prostheses in a more reasonable position. Meanwhile, it is unnecessary to open the femoral canal in a robot-assisted surgery, and the patient suffered less bleeding and less trauma. The osteotomic operation was accurate, and the patient restored to a satisfactory lower limb force line after the surgery. Compared with the traditional TKA, the robot-assisted TKA can help orthopedic surgeons solve the traditional problems of "invisibility", "inaccuracy" and "instability" in operation, and achieve higher operation accuracy.”