Purpose
The aim of this study was (1) to compare the clinical and radiological outcomes of robotic and conventional total knee arthroplasty with a minimum follow-up of 10 years, (2) to evaluate the survival rate, (3) and to estimate the accuracy of the two techniques by analyzing the outliers of the total knee arthroplasty (TKA) patients.
Methods
We evaluated 351 patients (390 knees), 155 patients undergoing robotic TKA and 196 patients treated with conventional TKA with a mean follow-up of 11.0 years. HSS, KSS, WOMAC, SF-12 questionnaires were used for clinical evaluation. Mechanical alignment, implant radiological measurements and outliers were analyzed for radiological results. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis was performed for survival rate.
Results
All clinical assessments showed excellent improvements in both groups (all, p<0.05), without any significant difference between the groups (p>0.05). The conventional TKA group showed a significantly higher number of outliers compared with the robotic TKA group (0<0.05). The cumulative survival rate was 98.8% in the robotic TKA group and 98.5% in the conventional TKA group with excellent survival (p=0.563).
Conclusion
Our study showed excellent survival with both robotic and conventional TKA and similar clinical outcomes at long-term follow-up. However, in terms of radiological outcome robotic TKA showed fewer outliers compared with conventional TKA. With longer follow-up and larger cohort, the accuracy and effectiveness of robotic TKA on implant survival rate can be elucidated in the future.
Keywords: Total knee arthroplasty, ROBODOC, Conventional, NexGen, Long-term