Medical Robotics Magazine: Comparing Endoscopic to Robotic Thyroid Surgery

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Medical Robotics Magazine is the world's first and only commercial feature news magazine devoted to all aspect of the medical robotics industry- including robotic surgery, physical therapy robots, hospital orderlies, and other topics related to robotic medicine. As a feature magazine, Medical Robotics features interviews, business news, conference coverage and editorials, as well as a generous portion of articles written by noteworthy robotics surgeons as well as clinical trials reports. MR has been on-line since 2007, and first appeared in print in January of 2008 at the annual meeting of MIRA (the Minimally Invasive Robotics Association) in Rome, Italy. Medical Robotics Magazine is copyrighted, features a nascent Board of Editorial Advisors, and is indexed by the U.S. Library of Congress. All contents (c) 2011 John J. Otrompke, JD Contact: John J. Otrompke, JD John_Otrompke@yahoo.com 646-730-0179

Friday, May 13, 2011

Comparing Endoscopic to Robotic Thyroid Surgery

   In a study which has been accepted for publication in the Annals of Surgery, Chung and colleagues compared 570 patients by conventional endoscopic thyroidectomy with 580 patients with the same condition treated with the da Vinci surgical system. The patients had papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (in which the tumor is smaller than a centimeter) without definite extrathyroidal tumor invasion ; those treated endoscopically were treated between November of 2001 and July of 2009, while those treated robotically were enrolled between October of 2007 and July of 2009.

   The number of retrieved central nodes was significantly greater in the robotic surgery group (4.3) compared to the endoscopic group (3.6).

   However, the rate of transient hypocalcemia was significantly more frequent in the robotic surgery group (37.8% versus 19.7%), as was the rate of permanent recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy (four patients in the robotic surgery group, or 0.7% of the total, compared to only one in the endoscopic group.
Postoperative hospital stays were not significantly different in either group, and there was no recurrence of the disease in either group, Chung said.