@denheels From what I hear, the robotic assisted spine surgeries are usually more complex like those instrumented with rods and screws. The screw placement at the lower end of the spine is very critical because if the screws are at the wrong angle or not in exactly the right place, they can pull out causing the hardware to loosen. The low end of the spine has a lot of extra pressure on it because it is bearing most of the body weight so this is critical to the success of the surgery.

With deformity spine surgery, sometimes the surgeon has to remove a pie shaped section of a vertebrae and piece it back together to straighten it and it fuses back together. There is a lot of math calculations of angles if this is needed for several levels on a big surgery. Precision would matter in that situation too.

I haven’t had a surgery like that, but I have listened to presentations of complex cases from spine conferences.