David L. Skaggs, MD

So instead of someone being sent for an MRI and at a separate time being sent for a CT, it could all be done at once.

And if you don't mind, there's even more to this one.

One of the biggest advances, you know, in the past decade or so in spine surgery has been using navigation intraoperatively and robotics intraoperatively.

And up until now, that has required a CT scan.

And now we can use this synthetic CT, the proprietary name right now is called bone MRI.

We can load that up into navigation and or robotics.

And all of a sudden we don't radiate the patient at any point for navigation or robotic usage, which is a complete game changer.

Yes.

Great question.

So, you know, I have to admit, I never even saw a robot until I came to Cedars.

And next thing you know, I'm really just trying to meet my colleagues and go into the rooms and seeing, wow, they're doing incredible surgery through tiny incisions.

And one of my partners, Dr. Corey Walker, who was trained at Barrow Institute with Juan Uribe, taught me how to use a robot.

And in

Young athletes and I'll say kids in college and high school, they frequently have something called spondylolisis, which basically means it's a fracture most commonly of L5.

In the old days to fix this, you had to open them up and put in screws and rods and hooks.

Now with the use of a robot, we could literally make a two centimeter incision or even less and put a screw or screws perfectly across the fracture site.

And I never, you know, back in my days at Children's Hospital, imagine I'd be doing outpatient pediatric spine surgery, but the use of robotics and navigation have really changed what we can do.

Yes, absolutely.

And one of the things that adult surgeons have taught us is how to align the spine in a way that leads to long-term back health and avoiding back pain.

And, you know, not to be too technical here, but when we do spondylolisthesis surgery, probably the most important thing is we get L4 to S1 to at least a 35 degree, if not, you know, 40 or 45 degree angle.