ConforMIS Partial Knee Replacement
JFK Memorial Hospital - Indio, CA
Knees take the brunt of most of our activity, so it’s little wonder we injure and wear them out. “The knee is the most common joint we treat,” says Dr. Raj Sinha, an orthopedic surgeon at John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Indio. “There are 600,000 [replacement surgeries] a year in the U.S.” That’s twice the number of hip replacements.
In November 2008, Sinha began performing a breakthrough implant procedure (only the 100th such surgery worldwide) using a custom-made iUni implant that allows doctors to preserve more of the patient’s ligaments, tendons, and cartilage.
“It functions in concert with most of the normal knee,” Sinha says. “The second advantage is, because of customization, you have an infinite number of sizes. Traditionally, you have eight sizes to work with and you shape the bone to fit the closest-size replacement.” With the iUni, doctors only shave about 3 millimeters off the thigh bone and 5 to 6 millimeters off the shin bone, compared with 10 to 12 millimeters off the thigh bone and 10 millimeters off the shin bone for standard implants.
The less-invasive surgery also shaves hospital stays by two-thirds. “The ability to get back to activities is sped up by 50 percent,” Sinha says. Even though the iUni implant and the tools used with it are patient-specific, the surgery is less expensive than traditional knee replacements. However, it takes four to six weeks to have the iUni implant made, and some patients don’t want to wait that long. For them, Sinha performs robotic partial knee replacements, using 3-D modeling from a CAT scan to program the robot.