Nano knee surgeries getting much smaller

Knees, shoulders, hips, elbows, ankles, wrists. This year, millions of people will suffer an injury to one or more of their joints, cartilages or muscles.

Minimally invasive surgery has become the gold standard for treating these injuries, and surgeries to repair them are becoming much smaller.

Jacob Ritting worried severe knee pain would keep him from riding his bike to work.

“We had an MRI done, and it showed a tear on one side of my knee, but that wasn’t where I was experiencing the most pain,” Ritting said.

MedStar Washington’s orthopedic surgeon Evan Argintar used nano arthroscopy to look inside Ritting’s knee.

“In the office without anesthesia, with him awake, I put this little camera in his knee,” Argintar said.

A normal scope is the size of a pencil eraser, but the nano-scope is the size of a pinhole.

“Minimally invasive surgery has evolved even further to be even less invasive than the minimally invasive,” Argintar said.

Doctor Argintar saw that Ritting had multiple meniscal tears and, through another pinhole incision, repaired the problem.

“He ended up getting it twice, one in the office that discovered a problem that the advanced imaging didn’t identify, and then secondarily, I did it interventionally in the operating room, and I was able to, in an ultra-minimally invasive way cure his problem,” Argintar said.

This should mean less anesthesia, less nerve damage, less recovery time, fewer complications and less risk of infection.

Less than a month after the procedure, Ritting was pedaling his way to work pain-free.

Doctor Argintar believes the nano procures will become the new gold standard for arthroscopes and may be used instead of MRI for some patients.