Clinical benefits of robotic surgery for rectal cancer

There are several surgical approaches for the radical operation for rectal cancer, such as open surgery (OS), conventional laparoscopic surgery (CLS), reduced port surgery, transanal-TME, and robotic assisted surgery (RALS).
CLS provides good magnification for surgeons, which helps surgeons to perform sufficient surgical dissection down to the pelvic floor than with conventional OS.
However, CLS for rectal cancer has remained a technical difficult procedure due to its unstable and limited range of motion.
RALS for rectal cancer is a promising new technology that will overcome the intrinsic limitations of CLS, giving the surgeon a multi-articulated instruments, digital suppression of physiologic hand tremor, and motion scaling. Moreover, as well as CLS, robotic surgeon can benefit from both the “bird view wide angle” and “magnified view”, which are the definite advantages of transabdominal approach.
The indication for RALS in our institute is every resectable rectal tumor except for total pelvic exenteration. RALS can be performed even for challenging cases of rectal cancer surgery, such as rectal cancer with lateral lymph node metastasis, combined resection of adjacent organs.
We will show our procedure and clinical results of RALS in this session.