FDA nod for synchronized motion table for Intuitive Surgical robotic surgical system

Print 26 January 2016
Stacy Lawrence / Fierce Medical Devices

Robotic surgery adherents will soon have a novel option--a table that can move with an Intuitive Surgical ($ISRG) robot during a surgical procedure. The idea is to enable surgeons to use gravity to their advantage by moving the table in tandem with a surgical robot to manipulate the patient's body for better surgical access or to remove some of the physical pressure from a certain bodily location.

Intuitive Surgical and Trumpf Medical, a division of Hill-Rom ($HRC), said the FDA has cleared their Integrated Table Motion for the da Vinci Xi Surgical System. It is slated to be available in the U.S. within the next few months; the surgical table is already marketed in Europe where it received a CE mark last June. The partners spent 5 years developing this integration of the two systems.

"This is computer-controlled coordinated motion between our product and the bed that allow surgeons to do real-time patient positioning for retraction using gravity as a retractor as well as being able to rotate the patient for anesthesia," summed up Intuitive Surgical President and CEO Gary Guthart at the recent J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco in anticipation of this news.

Surgical teams can reposition the operating table in real-time--even with the surgical robotic arms docked. That could help improve efficiency in the operating room and save on costs by maximizing surgical access, exposure and reach. The table and the surgical robot are synchronized, so that the after the table is repositioned, the surgical system adjusts its instrument arms, boom and endoscope to maintain the orientation to the patient's anatomy.

It's designed to work with Intuitive's latest robotic surgical system that launched in April 2014. The system is designed for use in minimally invasive surgery in gynecology, urology, thoracic, cardiac, and general surgery. Intuitive started out focused on urology and gynecology but has more recently expanded into other areas including general surgery indications. Currently, it's focused on moving more into colorectal, colon and rectal disease surgeries as well as hernia repair.

The company shipped 492 da Vinci Surgical Systems in 2015, up from 431 in 2014. Last year, there were about 652,000 surgical procedures conducted using a da Vinci Surgical System. That's a 14% over increase over 2014--but Intuitive expects that procedure growth rate to cool a bit this year, increasing only about 9% to 12%.

"The receipt of the CE mark in June of last year enabled us to perform first human use and a surgeon preference study in Europe to gain valuable insights into how Integrated Table Motion would be used clinically," Intuitive SVP and CMO Myriam Curet told FierceMedicalDevices.

"The full European launch began in October of 2015, and we are meeting our pre-launch expectations. We continue to receive positive feedback from European clinicians on their ability to leverage Integrated Table Motion in their robotic procedures, ranging from benign single-quadrant to complex multi-quadrant cases," she concluded.

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