Michel Lefranc hasn’t finished sewing his patient yet and already knows that his procedure is a disaster ” Success “ and that this woman, who was admitted in the morning, will be able to leave the hospital at the end of the day. As a neurosurgeon at Amiens University Hospital, he has just carried out a very special operation aimed at treating isolated lower back pain. He has not used screws to treat this type of pain for three years. Thanks to the robot, the small nerve endings of the joint are burned (rhizolysis) and the cartilage is destroyed, allowing bone fusion (arthrodesis). He would not have been successful without Rosa, a robot developed in collaboration with the engineer Bertin Nahum and his then company Medtech.

The surgeon from Amiens planned the entire procedure down to the smallest detail thanks to the creation of a digital twin of the patient. In the operating room, the image and the patient become one. “All you have to do is teach the robot where it is in space and where the patient is. explains Michel Lefranc as he attaches an instrument to the end of the robot arm. The machine then positions itself with millimeter precision where I need to intervene. » He can control everything using screens.

Surgical robotics, this surgeon in his 40s studied it during his internship in Amiens. Spinal surgery, implantation in the brain of patients with Parkinson’s disease… he performs 95% of his operations with pink.

Within his hospital, he helped found a robotic surgery research and study group (Greco) to develop robotics. Brain implant, surgery for severe and progressive scoliosis in a 6-year-old child, placement of a cochlear implant in a deaf patient… the Greco teams created by the University of Picardy together with the Amiens – Picardy University Hospital achieved between 2017 and in 2022 already nine world firsts. In December 2022, a knee prosthesis was installed using the Mako robot from Smart Robotics.

Urologists have paved the way

Rosa, Mako, Hugo, Da Vinci… Robots have revolutionized the practice of surgeons in just a few years. They take over the operating rooms. There was a lot of talk about this at a congress organized by the National Academy of Surgery in early December 2023. But make no mistake: it is not the robots who operate, but the surgeon who manipulates them.

In this race for innovation, the Da Vinci robot from the American company Intuitive Surgical, which looks like a giant octopus with its articulated arms, has gained a lead in so-called soft tissue surgery. In the 1980s, the Pentagon tasked several institutions, including NASA, with finding new surgical solutions to remotely treat wounded people on the battlefield. As a result of this research, the Da Vinci eventually ended up in the operating room in the early 2000s. The aim was cardiac surgery, particularly coronary bypass transplants. But it is primarily urologists who have taken advantage of this new instrument for operations on prostate or kidney cancer because it allows them to reach difficult-to-reach anatomical areas. No wonder: these same specialists were also among the first to introduce minimally invasive laparoscopic (or laparoscopic) surgery.

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