Orthopaedic surgeon Dr Woodward demonstrates  a robot that is used in joint replacement surgery at Mayo Private Hospital. - video Dailymotion

Orthopaedic surgeon Dr Woodward demonstrates  a robot that is used in joint replacement surgery at Mayo Private Hospital.

Transcript

00:00So what the robot does then is, rather than cutting through a slide of guide that we would normally use to put a saw blade through,

00:11which has some imperfections and some inaccuracies, this thing knows exactly where your bone is in space

00:20and knows exactly where I want to cut, and then I can reliably cut it exactly where I plan to.

00:27It's pretty impressive in that you can just bring this, we still operate it, it's not like we sit there and just let it do its work,

00:36we still have to drive it, but we can just bring it in and then it comes into place,

00:43and then we saw it and we can see on the screen where the bone is being removed and which bits we've still got to get.

00:54The screen starts exactly as Dr. Woodridge was saying here, with the cut ready to go,

01:00so that's already been planned, with the cut plane in place, and if you just take that angle back,

01:09it shows a blue runway, so it shows that it's ready for the saw blade to get into position,

01:14and then with a pull of the trigger, it will actually line itself up with the cut plane.

01:20So the robot can't just line itself up exactly as planned, it knows where it has to go.

01:24When it's free, it's good to actually make the cut, and so it's got full power.

01:38So that's removing, that's cutting the volume where we've got the straight blue line.

01:45So if I went too far accidentally like this, I can't do it, so I can't get it through there,

01:55so I just kind of push the side of the line.

01:58So, occasionally, I think I'm blocking it as I'm cutting,

02:17but if you leave the end of the cut there, and you move the knee now,

02:26the robot cutter will follow it in space without even having to hold it onto the robot cutter.

02:31So that is just following it, because it knows that it wants to be locked into that plane,

02:37no matter where that knee is in space.