Sculptor’s exciting technology enables the surgeon to decide where, when and how much bone to resect with the added reassurance of Acrobot’s patented ‘Active Constraint’ robotic guidance. The ‘Patient Plan’ is uploaded into Sculptor and using active constraint a high speed burr allows precise targeted bone removal in a safe and controlled manner.

The ‘Patient Plan’ that was created in Acrobot Planner will calculate a volume of bone that needs to be removed to facilitate precise placement of the individual components of the implant. Sculptor then verifies that volume and creates a ‘no-fly zone’ outside it meaning that the active constraint built into the system prevents incorrect removal of the bone.

The Active Constraint concept was used successfully in a randomised, double blind comparative clinical investigation in 2004 (published in: Cobb et al., J Bone Joint Surg [Br] 2006;88-B:188-97) where 13 unicondylarl knee replacements were carried out using the Acrobot system and 15 were performed conventionally. The study demonstrated that the Acrobot system consistently and accurately enables the positioning of a prosthetic implant according to a surgical plan. 13/13 Acrobot cases were implanted within 2° of a desired orientation versus 6/15 for the conventional cases. The bar chart below summarises these results:

 

The Acrobot Sculptor device is at an advanced development stage and will be released in Europe in early 2010 following completion of our ongoing clinical evaluation of the new product configuration. This technology offers benefits such as reduced instrumentation and reduced instrument processing costs when compared with conventional techniques.

 

Products are currently NOT available in the US