Robotic surgery in urology: the way forward

Excerpt

The idea of robotic intervention in medicine is not recent. In 1960, a preliminary report on robotic angiography was published [1]. In the late 1980s, applications of robotic stereotactic neurosurgery were explored [2]. In the early 1990s, there were early experiences with robotic-assisted laparoscopy [3], and during the same period, the first “urologic” robotic system—the Probot—was described by investigators from the Imperial College in London with the purpose of performing transurethral prostate resections [4, 5]. A decade later, at the dawn on the new century, French and German groups reported the first cases of robotic assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy using the first generation DaVinci system [6, 7], and soon after the world’s first robotic prostate cancer surgery program was established by Dr. Menon and his team in Detroit [8]. …