The first robotic lobectomy for lung cancer in its early stage has been performed at the South Nassau Communities Hospital.
The operation was carried out by a team of physicians and included Kenneth Richman, an interventional radiologist; Evan Mair, South Nassau’s Director of body imaging; Arun Gupta, Specialist in internal medicine and Cardiologist; Stuart Fox, cardiothoracic surgeon; Alan Blum, specialist in critical and pulmonary care; and Shahriyour Andaz, Director of thoracic oncology in South Nassau. The surgery was performed on a 68 year old patient who had been undergoing treatment for anemia before being diagnosed as having colon cancer. Scans revealed that there were cancerous lesions in the lung’s upper left lobe.
Dr. Richman used Wire localization to improve the access of the lesion for the surgical team. Dr Fox and Dr Andaz utilized the da Vinci robotic surgical system and cautiously separated the lobe from its blood supply and then removed the lobe. For the completion of the surgery, the doctors needed to make only four tiny incisions in the chest, through which they inserted a small scope for obtaining a three-dimensional view of the area. Slim robotic assisted surgery instruments were also inserted for removing the cancerous part. The traditional lung cancer surgery would be performed with large incisions, which would be highly painful and incapacitating for the patient and these surgeries also would need a long recovery time for the patient.
Patients who have diagnosed as having early stage lung cancer could undergo robotic assisted lung cancer surgery. A number of studies done on over 100 patients, who had undergone robotic lobectomy, reveal that this surgery is completely effective and safe for the patients. The results of a study has been published in the Journal of Thoracic Surgery in its August 2009 edition and has reported that the disease does not recur, there were no intraoperative deaths and the surgical time was on an average of 216 minutes with a hospital stay of four days for the patient. This surgery has been performed in the hospitals all over the world and has increased from 80000 in the year 2007 to 205,000 in 2009. The name da Vinci has been used to honor Leonardo da Vinci, the inventor of the first robot used for three-dimensional details and incomparable accuracy.
Source: http://www.southnassau.org/