One and Two Year Postoperative Patient Reported Outcomes of Robotic-Assisted Total Knee Arthroplasty

Abstract

Total knee arthroplasty is a successful procedure. However, there is still area for improvement as up to 15-20% of patients remain unsatisfied. Robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) may improve patient outcomes by providing a reproducible way of obtaining neutral mechanical alignment of the limb, which has been shown to reduce early revisions and correlate with patient reported outcomes after surgery.We prospectively enrolled 106 patients undergoing robotic-assisted TKA by a single surgeon performing a measured-resection femur-first technique using the OMNIBotic system. Patients completed a KOOS and New Knee Society Score (KSS) pre-operatively and at 3, 6, 12, and 24 months (M) postoperatively. Changes in the five KOOS sub-scales were compared to available literature data from the FORCE – TJR cohort, as well as to individual studies reporting on conventional and computer-assisted TKA.When compared to FORCE-TJR 6-month (M) and 2-year (Y) data, the RAS cohort had significantly higher improvements at 6M for pain (40.5 vs. 31.1, p<.001) and at 2Y for all five KOOS sub-scores. The larger improvement was due to the RAS cohort having lower baseline KOOS scores than the FORCE-TJR cohort, except for the Sports-Recreation sub-score, which was similar pre- operatively but significantly higher post-operatively for the robotic cohort. Rates of dissatisfaction with knee pain level and function using the KSS after RAS were 3.0%, 1.0%, and 2.7% at 6, 12, and 24M postoperatively, respectively.Despite having poorer joint function and higher pain pre-operatively, robotic-assisted TKA patients achieved excellent self-reported outcomes, with significantly higher levels of improvement through two years post-surgery when compared with large national cohort studies. Further controlled clinical studies are warranted to determine if these results translate to other groups of surgeons, centers and patients.

Clinical Outcomes after Computed Tomography-Based Total Knee Arthroplasty: A Minimum 3-Year Analyses

“…Blum et al in a more recent study aimed to determine the long-term patient outcomes of robotic-assisted technology. 21 They prospectively analyzed 106 patients who underwent RA-TKA with a different system from the one in the present study. Their preoperative and approximately 3-month, 6-month, 1-year, and 2-year postoperative outcomes of interest were Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score for Joint Replacement (KOOS, JR), KSS, and Veterans RAND-12 (VR-12).…”