Dr Matthew Banger has won the European Federation of National Associations of Orthopaedics and Traumatology (EFORT) Free Paper Gold Award in Orthopaedics for 2019.
Project lead, Professor Philip Rowe from the University of Strathclyde, said: ”We’re delighted that the study and Dr Banger have received this recognition.”
Biomedical engineer Dr Banger delivered his paper Five Years of a Randomised Trial of Robotic Arm Assisted versus Manual Surgery at the annual EFORT Conference in Lisbon and was also awarded a €1,500 cash prize.
The paper outlines the five year outcomes of a study underway at Glasgow Royal Infirmary which uses a revolutionary Stryker Mako robotic-arm system to help carry out knee surgery.
It is a collaboration between surgeons, Strathclyde bio-engineers and US health care company Stryker Mako and has tracked 140 patients over five years.
Dr Banger said: “I am delighted to accept the award on behalf of the whole project team, including the clinicians at the Royal.
“Running randomised controlled trials for medical devices can be quite a difficult thing to do and not many people do it. You have to have the infrastructure to set it up so it has to be scientifically robust and you have to be comparing two different types of procedures.
“The NHS system in Scotland means we can track people relatively well and see how they are doing and people are generally pretty good at volunteering for studies.”
The study compared the outcomes on patients who underwent the experimental surgery and those who had the traditional knee replacement surgery.
With the robotic surgery, images of the patient’s knee are loaded into software which controls the robot’s movements and sensors are placed on the patient’s knee to tell the robot its exact position.
Results were compared with the UK ‘gold standard’ the Oxford knee implant, which revolutionised orthopaedic surgery as one of the most successful and widely used partial knee replacements in the world.
Dr Banger said: “The study had two groups of patients, one who underwent robotic surgery and the other manual surgery – the standard of care they would have had anyway when they came into the hospital.
“We generally showed that early on there were differences they could see but by the time they got to five years the differences had narrowed and there wasn’t as much difference between the two groups.”
Professor Rowe said: “The study shows there were small but significant improvements and people who had the robotic surgery have better functionality, get back on their feet quicker, have shorter hospital stays and less analgesics.”
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