Medical technology company Smith+Nephew is helping personalise robotically-enabled surgery with AI-powered planning software and a data visualisation platform.

The UK company has introduced two products for its robotics and digital surgery portfolio – personalised planning powered by AI and the RI.Insights data visualisation platform.

These transform data into contextual intelligence by enabling surgeons to see how pre-operative surgical plans and intra-operative decision-making link to post-operative outcomes.

The firm has expanded the knee-replacement capabilities of its Cori surgical system with personalised planning powered by AI, guided by RI.Insights data. This addition enables the surgeon to set the initial implant placement within the total knee arthroplasty procedure based on AI-guided reference values and the surgeon’s planning preferences for specific implants and patient-specific deformities.

“Advanced analytics combined with the Cori surgical system will offer a new dimension in joint arthroplasty,” said Thorsten Seyler from Duke University in North Carolina. “It will allow for true personalisation when performing joint replacement procedures.”

This AI-powered enhancement lets surgeons customise planning for both their preferences and the patient’s anatomy at the time of surgery.

Using RI.Insights, surgeons can reference individual case performance and benchmark those data against an anonymised global database. The platform was designed to give surgeons a simple and effective way to link patient reported outcome measures (proms) to pre-operative planning and intra-operative decisions in robotically-enabled knee replacements.

Surgeon-specific dashboards provide the ability to analyse procedure data, such as case times, resections and alignment, and ligament tensioning data from the Cori digital tensioner. RI.Insights delivers a way to visualise data, connect proms, address known problems with information access and use, and transform surgical insights into actionable information.

“The ability to retrospectively and prospectively evaluate and characterise data, to do what is best for every patient is unique and something we have not been able to do before now,” said Steven Nishiyama from the Desert Orthopaedic Center in Nevada.

Smith+Nephew is a portfolio medical technology company focused on the repair, regeneration and replacement of soft and hard tissue. Founded in Hull, UK, in 1856, it now operates in more than 100 countries, and generated annual sales of $5.2bn in 2022.