The technology in your surgery, explained in plain English

All surgical robots in joint replacement share a mission — turn a personalized 3D plan into millimeter-exact execution — but each has a personality. ROSA® (Zimmer Biomet) builds its plan from standard X-rays, no CT scan needed, and gives live feedback on alignment and soft-tissue balance. MAKO (Stryker) uses CT-based planning with a haptic arm that physically enforces cutting boundaries. CORI (Smith+Nephew) is a compact, image-free handheld system. VELYS (DePuy Synthes) integrates plan-and-execute guidance directly at the surgical field. Dr. Morton is certified on all four — the first Hawai‘i surgeon fellowship-trained in robotic joint replacement — so the platform serves your case, not a vendor contract. On Hawai‘i Island that platform is Mako: hip and knee replacements at Hilo Community Surgery Center are planned from a CT scan of your own joint and performed with the Mako arm. The clinical payoff lives on the robotic hip and robotic knee pages.

Want the full engineering story? Two deep dives: how ROSA® works (X-ray planning, live ligament balancing — the platform behind Hawai‘i's robotic firsts) and how Mako SmartRobotics™ works (CT-based planning, haptic boundaries, and the reference standard for partial knees).

The Persona IQ® is the first FDA-cleared smart knee: sensors in the implant's stem measure your step count, walking speed, cadence, and range of motion, transmitting daily to a secure portal your care team reviews. Because the sensor is inside the implant, there is no wearable to forget. Dr. Morton placed Hawai‘i's first in October 2022. It is offered case by case — candidacy depends on anatomy and bone quality, and individual results vary.

Around the smart implant sits a broader monitoring ecosystem: app-based recovery platforms that deliver your daily exercise program, track milestones, and flag concerning trends to the clinic between visits — pairing naturally with telehealth follow-ups. For neighbor island and international patients, this stack is what makes 'recovery at home, surgeon in Honolulu' genuinely workable rather than hopeful.

Two imaging technologies bookend the surgical journey. Before surgery: 3D planning converts your imaging — a CT scan with Mako, calibrated X-rays with ROSA — into a virtual model where implant size, position, and alignment are optimized before an incision exists. After — when problems arise: standard MRI turns to static near metal, so the Revision Clinic uses Metal Artifact Reduction MRI, which suppresses implant distortion to reveal the soft tissues around a painful replacement. It's frequently the study that finally explains a mystery joint.