European Urology, a journal devoted to research, has published that the robot assisted surgery using the da Vinci Surgical system for removal of cancerous prostrate glands is safe with a less than 1% major complication rate, based on a long term study.
The da Vinci Surgical System is often used in robot-assisted prostate cancer operations.
A release from the Henry Ford Health System stated that even after five years, almost 87% of the patients had no recurrence of cancer. This procedure removes the prostate gland completely along with the tissue surrounding it.
At the Vattikutti Urology Institute in Detroit, researchers had studied 3,317 patients from the period of January 2005 to December 2009. These patients had been operated upon by Dr. Mani Menon who has been surgically removing prostate glands utilizing the da Vinci robot surgical system. The system is used by the surgeon to remotely control the robot arms to create small incisions in the patient. On screen the progress is monitored by the surgeon.
The evaluation results showed that patients had to be hospitalized for one day only. Post-op complications such as blood loss were found in almost 10% of the patients but mostly they were only minor complications. In almost all these cases, the complications could be predicted even before the surgery because the patients had heart disease and also due to the Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) scores. This study, which was a first of its kind, concluded that robot assisted removal of cancerous prostate glands were in the long run safe and sound. The study reveals that in the US, Robot-assisted radical Prostatectomy (RARP) is a technique used prevalently to treat localized prostate cancer. Moreover, the institute, which belongs to the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit also noted that another study has revealed that robotic surgery was equally effective or better than minimally invasive laparoscopic procedures for the treatment of kidney diseases.
Source: http://www.henryfordhealth.org/body.cfm?id=41144