SRS x POSNA: Previewing Pediatric Spine in Sydney | Scoliosis Dialogues

These were really good things to discuss, but I'm going to move on from slightly controversial things to other hot topics in the field, which includes that all of our practices have been altered by a pretty big influx of a wide variety of enabling technologies.

Um, so what I want to ask you guys is which ones, well, it's a two-part question, which ones have changed your practice the most? And then what steps have you taken or are you taking to make sure that they don't detract from your trainees education? So this time I'll start with Sukhin.

Well, there's a couple of different categories of enabling technologies.

I think that, um, moving beyond cobs, bovies and osteotomes, we've adopted some power instruments, both for pedicle preparation and as well as facetectomy and posterior column releases such as ultrasonic cutting devices.

So I think they've been great at limiting the time and bleeding.

Um, cause you know, I like to do the routine PCO as Dan knows.

Um, And then I think what you're really asking about is navigation and robotics.

And navigation's been at our place since 2012.

We use it for the more complicated stuff, and I think it makes us better, especially in the more complex things.

We emphasize safety, and this is a great way to place screws in places that are quite difficult.

And we've had the robot for about a year, and I would say there's active robotics in freestanding children's hospitals at less than a handful.

So why has it not been adopted so widely in pediatric deformities because there's obvious challenges.

So we want to study those challenges.

We want to look at the learning curve and we want to look at the data to see how this can help patients.

And there's a whole realm of how these enabling technologies can help surgeons prevent overuse injuries, cognitive load, and maybe extend your career.

So I think those are important aspects to look at.

And we want to see if we can generate the evidence to prove this is actually better rather than what some people use as a hallway trophy.

How about Dr.

Blakemore next? For me, navigation has definitely changed my practice in the last three or four years.

I use a... surface topography navigation technique that hopefully soon we'll be able to adopt with an MRI-based synthetic CT.

So we can really, not only have we already minimized the radiation risk, I think, for the team, but we've minimized the radiation for the patient if we can adopt that as a newer technology for navigation.

And I have to say, I feel that I'm a little more accurate and struggle a little less with the ones I used to struggle with at right side of T4 and things like that.

with the navigation and it doesn't slow me down.

I think with the trainees, you know, it's, I don't want them not to be able to put pedicle screws in freehand or to have to stop if the navigation is not working that day.

So we really have to pay attention to how we train them.