ECC 2015

How has surgery developed over the last decade?

Dr Giulia Veronesi - Humanitas Research Hospital, Milan, Italy

Can you describe your robotic surgery techniques?

The surgical approach has changed a lot during the last twenty years and become less and less invasive. It has been introduced minimally invasive surgery to treat lung cancer, typically video thoracoscopic surgery around twenty years ago, but the diffusion has been very slow and adoption, probably because of technical difficulties and rigid instruments. So robotic surgery has been introduced around ten years ago and has started to be developed to overcome the limitations of the video thoracoscopic approach, maintaining minimal invasivity but the same results of open surgery in terms of radicality of lymph nodes and type of comfortable surgery for the surgeons.

So we started our activity in 2007, we have done more than 250 cases of robotic lobectomies and segmentectomies. The main advantage is the precision of the movements which are entreated movements, you usually work in a console so you are separated from the patient and you have a three dimensional view of the field compared to the two dimensional view that you have in the video thoracoscopic approach. So the operation is simpler and the results are very good. We will start a comparison, a randomised trial, to compare traditional video thoracoscopic approach versus robotic to increase the evidence of the advantages of this type of tool.