What is Robotic Surgery?

Learn what is Robotic Surgery and how effective it is in this video with Dr Eugene Yeo - General and Colorectal Surgeon at TEN Surgery (a member of Healthway Medical).
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Transcript​:
0:03
My name is Eugene and I’m a general and colorectal surgeon. As part of my work, I deal with a lot of surgical conditions, but my interest is actually minimally invasive surgery, which includes laparoscopic and robotic surgery.

0:16 What is Robotic Surgery?
When the term robotic surgery is brought up, many people usually imagine that in the theater, the surgeon presses a button and when the patient is ready, the robot comes in and does the surgery for us. Unfortunately that’s not the truth. So actually robotic surgery is a type of minimally invasive surgery, which essentially is a type of surgery that uses keyholes to do surgery that was previously done with a big cut.

For robotic surgery, we use a robot as an interface to do the manipulation and we control the robot while doing the surgery. So the accurate term should actually be robotic-assisted surgery rather than robotic surgery per se.

0:56 What has your experience been with Robotic Surgery?
When I first experienced robotic surgery, I was quite amazed by the experience. The reason is because the console of the robot actually immerses me inside the surgical experience as opposed to laparoscopic when you’re kind of further away and looking at the screen from far away. So it feels like I am within almost a smaller version of me within the patient and doing the surgery with free movement and very adaptable and dexterous movements. So it really makes the surgery so much easier and so much more pleasant, and also ergonomically a lot more comfortable as compared to laparoscopic surgery.

1:38 Does that mean that Robotic Surgery is better than Laparoscopic Surgery?
So if you look at laparoscopic surgery instruments, the instruments are actually straight and they have very limited movements. They can rotate and they can open and close, but the robotic surgery instruments actually risk, so they move like a human wrist. So you can imagine how much more free and how much more dexterous it can be, especially in small areas of the abdominal cavity or any other cavity that we do surgery in.

If I had to score a procedure, for example, on how well it’s done, if you want me to compare robotics and laparoscopic, it’s very likely that the robotic platform will give me a better score on the procedure as compared to the laparoscopic one.

2:20
So if you are a patient that happens to need surgery, maybe it might be a good idea to consider speaking to your surgeon about consideration of robotic surgery and whether it will be beneficial for you.