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St. David's Medical Center First in Central Texas To Perform New Knee Replacement Procedure With Customized Implants

Monday, June 29, 2009

TruMatch™ Personalized Solutions Designed to Increase Precision and Efficiency

On Monday, June 29, 2009, doctors at St. David's Medical Center will perform a new knee replacement procedure that uses customized patient instrumentation for increased accuracy. Doctors at St. David's Medical Center are the first in Central Texas, and among the first in the nation, to use customized instruments.

TruMatch™ Personalized Solutions is designed to improve implant positioning and increase procedure efficiency. Doctors use a CT scan of the patient's knee to develop a computer-generated plan based on that patient's anatomy. Custom instruments are then made to be surgically inserted into the patient's knee.

“With customized instruments, we know a patients' anatomy before we even step into the operating room,” Dr. Matt Heinrich, an orthopedic surgeon with Orthopaedic Specialists of Austin who practices at St. David's Medical Center, said. “Having a three-dimensional model of the bone allows us to plan the exact locations of the bone cuts, without any additional guides, making it much less invasive.”

This instrumentation brings many advantages to surgeons and patients, including Advanced Planning Software that can be customized to both the patient's anatomy and the surgeon's surgical preferences, utilization of the mechanical axis for alignment, and integrated metal saw and pin captures for improving accuracy and minimizing bone debris. It also brings greater precision, especially in treating obese patients, and requires less time under anesthesia.

“Because it's much more precise, this procedure requires less time in the operating room,” Dr. Heinrich said. “It also requires fewer incisions, and there is no need for additional pin sites for traditional navigation.”

To date, doctors at St. David's Medical Center have treated about five patients using TruMatch™ Personalized Solutions customized implants, and have an additional ten patients scheduled for the procedure.