Robotic thyroid surgery using bilateral axillo-breast approach: personal initial experience over two years

Abstract

Aim. Although endoscopic thyroid surgery is gaining wide acceptance, however, manual endoscopic operation also has shown several limitations. The advent of robotic surgical systems, such as the da Vinci surgical system (Intuitive Surgical, Mountain View, CA, USA), is expected to make it possible to overcome some limitations of manual endoscopic operation. Herein we report a single surgeon (H.Y.K.)`s initial two-year experience of new robotic thyroid operations using the bilateral axillo-breast approach (BABA#, the approach which has definite advantages and recently has been widely used for the traditional endoscopic thyroid surgery.

Methods. Between July 2008 and July 2010, 93 patients underwent robotic thyroid surgery using the BABA, with the da Vinci-S surgical system, at the Korea University Anam Hospital, Seoul, Korea. The data on the patients` clinicopathological characteristics, operation types, operation times, surgical results, postoperative hospital stays and complications were collected in a prospective manner, and later evaluated.

Results. Seventy-two total thyroidectomies with or without central neck dissections mostly for the papillary carcinomas, twenty lobectomies with or without central neck dissections for the minute - smaller than 0.5 cm in their maximal d