Dr Lucas Richie - Robotic Assisted Knee Surgery - Hughston Clinic Orthopaedics

Hughston Clinic Orthopaedics, Serving the Nashville Area. Learn more at

Robotic assisted knee surgery is a newer form of traditional knee surgery. It’s essentially building on the principles that we’ve known and continuously learning about for many years now. The biggest difference now is that with robotic assisted knee surgery we're obtaining pre-operative templating in the form of a 3-dimentional CAT scan that helps to fully identify the patient’s true native anatomy.

Traditional knee surgery, we are very talented and very blessed with all these well thought out and planned guides that make assumptions that most people are aligned the way they should be aligned. With the robotic system we know that’s not exactly true and we’re able to tailor the knee replacement to each individual to give them a very specific fit that’s just right for their body and their normal anatomy.

With the robotic assisted surgery one of the... there's two key words, number one is robotic of course, the second is assisted . The surgeon is still in charge. I am still performing the procedure. The robot is just an instrument in mine and the other surgeons hands so as to help provide an optimal outcome.

What the robot does is it makes it essentially impossible to cut or do anything outside of the pre-planned procedure. We can certainly making adjustments interoperatively, if needed, but the robot has a system of checks and balances as well as a higher degree of precision that we have never been able to capture before.

Here in Lebanon we have been fortunate. We have the MAKO robot which is the product of Stryker and that robot is in my opinion something that I think is going to benefit a lot of people in that -
compared to other systems I’ve used in the past - many other systems are robotic assisted. They help you with the planning and they help you with your reference points and your guide placement but they don’t actually assist in the full procedure. They don’t assist in necessarily the technical portions of it whereas the robot we have does do that. In my opinion from what I experienced in the past can offer a little bit more assistance interoperatively to get the optimal outcome.

Robotic assisted surgery is going to be very beneficial for the state of Tennessee particularly in the middle Tennessee region where we’re located for a couple of reasons. Number one - we are very fortunate that we have had the robot longer than some other facilities around the state around the country and we have done several hundred robotic assisted surgeries over the last several years. That being said we have therefore been on an earlier roll out plan for this newer technology with the robot total knee that other people are not able to obtain yet.

So I think we are on the cutting edge of the technology. I think it’s going to help our practice, I think it is going to help the people that we are going to serve here, and I think we’re going to do be able to do a more technically sound surgery with implants that are positioned exactly where they need to be based on each individual and I believe this is going to lead to greater and better outcomes that will last longer.