Clinical Robotic Surgery Association Fifth Worldwide Congress, Washington DC, 3–5 October 2013: Robotic Colorectal Surgery

The colorectal session was one of the most successful and well attended sessions at the Fifth Worldwide Clinical Robotic Surgery Association Congress because of the increasing interest and diffusion of robotic techniques in this specific field. This session was structured as follows: two technical focuses, one on rectal resection and the other on right colectomies; a journal club with two hot topic papers presented by the authors; a face-to-face on single-port laparoscopic versus robotic surgery; an update on the transanal approach; and three lectures, on the oncologic safety of robotic total mesorectal excision, on the use of fluorescence in colorectal surgery, and finally an update on the ongoing ROLARR trial (laparoscopic versus robotic rectal resection).