Robot-assisted thoracic surgery. Our first experiences

Our goal was to examine the postoperative indicators after the first 300 thoracic robotic cases in the National Institute of Oncology. We retrospectively analyzed the clinicopathological and postoperative indicators of the first 300 patients. We also compared the first 30 cases performed by one surgeon to his 30 VATS (video-assisted thoracic surgery) and open cases. The average hospital stay was 5.2 days, the chest tube was removed on the second day. Conversion, need for reoperation and morbidity was low (1.8%, 2% and 10.6%, respectively). The change in operating time slows down after 20 cases. The hospital stay and complications were slightly favorable with RATS (robotic-assisted thoracic surgery) than with VATS. The intensive care stay, however, was significantly shorter while the amount of removed lymph nodes was significantly higher in RATS procedures. As a conclusion, RATS is a safe technique in thoracic surgery. Moreover, more lymph nodes are removed with RATS which can lead to better staging.