Uro Flash
Uro Flash 2018 › Uro Flash Vol-4, No-3, 2018

Urology Robotic Surgery: Past, Present and Future

Despite making achievable a variety of complex operations, traditional laparoscopy has certain major limitations, for instance the 2-dimensional vision, instrumentation with restricted degrees of freedom, and reduced tactile feedback (haptics). All these factors make delicate dissections and anastomoses difficult if not impossible. As such, there was a need to have some mechanical apparatus to aid or augment what is not possible with the human hands. This idea of having a mechanical hand has been explored in diverse industry fields, including medicine; wherein the most significant utilization of this demand has been reflected in the fields of surgery, including urology.1,2 As minimally invasive procedures increasingly found way into surgical domains, the advent of Robots allowed to further refine these procedures by overcoming many limitations of minimally invasive surgery, and thus allowing for enhanced surgical outcomes.3-7 Robotic surgery offers some of the consistently reproducible advantages over open and laparoscopic approaches, such as smaller incisions, enhanced precision, reduced intra-operative blood loss, decreased post-operative pain, and shorter hospital lengths of stay and convalescence.