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 that maps your joint and builds the plan in the operating room. 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. For knees on O‘ahu he operates primarily with ROSA at The Queen's Medical Center and with CORI at Adventist Health Castle. On Hawai‘i Island the 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, and Mako is the platform for his robotic hips. 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-authorized (De Novo, 2021) 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 only when Dr. Morton is using Zimmer Biomet implants, and then 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 patients in Hawai‘i. 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 any bone is cut: 3D planning turns your anatomy into a virtual model where implant size, position, and alignment are optimized before any bone is cut — from calibrated X-rays with ROSA, his primary knee platform at The Queen's Medical Center; from a CT scan taken before surgery with Mako in Hilo; or, with CORI for knees at Adventist Health Castle, from a map of your joint made in the operating room. 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.