Officials at the world’s largest medical device company think their Mazor X Stealth robot-assisted spinal surgical platform could move complex procedures from an art to a science.
Medtronic is betting that robot-assisted surgery could be a game changer when it comes to spine surgeries.
The company late last year closed on its $1.7 billion purchase of Mazor Robotics and its robot-assisted surgery platform for the spine. A month later, Medtronic launched its Mazor X Stealth robotic-assisted spinal surgical platform in the U.S.
The Mazor X Stealth combines robotic guidance system technology from the Mazor acquisition with Medtronic’s StealthStation surgical navigation technology.
Dave Anderson, VP and general manager of enabling technologies at Medtronic, recently spoke with Medical Design & Outsourcing about how the Mazor X Stealth could greatly improve spine surgery outcomes.
MDO: Why is it important for Medtronic to compete in the robot-assisted orthopedic surgery space?
Anderson: It’s really about improving outcomes. If you take spine in particular, for example, you can see over the past decades that it hasn’t been as predictable as we want. It’s complex. So how do we move complex procedures to be really predictable, moving them from art to science? How do we simplify them? All those things are what robotics can bring us. … In many procedure types, and spine being a classic example, there’s been a lot of innovation, but outcomes aren’t where we need them to be. That plays into the opioid crisis as well — as failed back surgery causes pain which then causes, unfortunately, the opioid crisis that we’re facing.
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