With the advancement of laparoscopic instruments and computer sciences, complex surgical procedures are expected to be safely performed by robot assisted telemanipulative laparoscopic surgery. The da Vinci system (Intuitive Surgical, Mountain View, CA, USA) became available at the many surgical fields. The wrist like movements of the instrument's tip, as well as 3-dimensional vision, could be e...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The general surgeon's robotic learning curve may improve if the experience is classified into categories based on the complexity of the procedures in a small community hospital. The intraoperative time should decrease and the incidence of complications should be comparable to conventional laparoscopy. The learning curve of a single robotic general surgeon in a small co...

OBJECTIVE To describe a robotic technique for transaxillary gasless thyroidectomy with the addition of intraoperative peripheral nerve monitoring in the surgical management of thyroid disease. DESIGN Prospective study. SETTING Academic institution. PATIENTS Fifty patients underwent robotic transaxillary thyroidectomy from September 1, 2009, to August 31, 2010. All the patients underwent p...

Laparoscopic procedures provide shorter hospitalization, less pain, better cosmetic results, and faster returns to normal than traditional surgery. Surgeons performing them, however, are hampered by lack of tridimensional view and haptic sense, and by remoteness; but this physical gap also allows robotic and computer interfaces. The computer digitizes surgical movements and images and modifies ...

INTRODUCTION Laparoscopic surgery is subject to certain limitations that can be a problem when performing complex minimally invasive operations. Robotic surgery was developed precisely to overcome such technical limitations. The question therefore arises whether robotic surgery leads to significantly better results compared with standard laparoscopic surgery. METHODS Based on comparative syst...

Background Robotic distal pancreatectomy (RDP) has a better or comparable surgical outcome when compared with laparoscopic (LDP). However, whether the for these procedures in local, low-volume hospitals are those of typically larger centers described published reports remains unclear.

Part I of this tutorial described two broad paradigms of interventional assistance: surgical computer-aided design (CAD)/computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) and surgical assistance. Part II focused on the underlying concepts of surgical CAD/CAM, with a particular emphasis on percutaneous procedures. This final installment of our three-part tutorial series discusses surgical assistance. In this s...