The Robotic Surgeon Blog

  • Prostate Cancer: Is PSA Screening effective

    There were 2 articles summarized from the EAU 2007 conference on Urotoday. They seemed to be conflicting, with one saying that delaying therapy did not seem to hurt many people and the other concluding that screening helped. UroToday – EAU 2007 – Session on Prostate Cancer Screening: Dr. Pelzer, Innsbruck presented data that the pathologic…

  • Prostate Cancer: Obese men are more likely to have worse pathology reports than expected

    Dr. Koop – Biopsy Underestimates Prostate Cancer in Overweight Men: Researchers compared the biopsy grade to the cancer grade following radical prostatectomy, which is the removal of the prostate. In 1,113 men who underwent radical prostatectomy between 1996 and 2005 within the Shared Equal Access Regional Cancer Hospital database, 299 men, or 27 percent, had…

  • daVinci Surgery: PK dissecting forceps

    One of my favorite instruments for robotic surgery is the PK dissector. As all daVinci instruments, It is made by intuitive surgical. It was developed in combination with gyrus medical. It is a bipolar instrument that can be used instead of the maryland bipolar or precise bipolar. The main advantages include: Less charring and sticking…

  • Prostate Cancer: Researchers find genetic links

    Scientists have identified several genetic risk factors for prostate cancer, shedding new light on the cause of a leading worldwide cancer killer among men that hits U.S. blacks especially hard. ‘The importance of it is that this is the first real evidence of the genetic basis of prostate cancer,’ said Dr. Brian Henderson, dean of…

  • Delivery of the Median Lobe: A novel way to perform one of the most difficult parts of the dvP

    This is my first technique that I will be adding to a new section of the blog. After watching many videos and trying different ways to approach an intravesical median lobe, I found a new way to take care of it. The following video was uploaded to google video and shows the dissection of a…

  • Do you need to remove the whole prostate if I have prostate cancer surgery

    This is one of the most common questions that patients ask me, especially if the cancer is confined to one area on biopsy. With robotic surgery I am able to remove part of a prostate if I want to, and I often do that for BPH operations. For prostate cancer it is not the correct…

  • Lowering PSA and PSA velocity: Are we doing the best thing

    screening prostate biopsy

  • Laser in laparoscopic prostatectomy

    IngentaConnect Laser nerve-sparing laparoscopic radical prostatectomy: a feasibi…: Five patients were treated with NSLRP; in patient 1 the right NVB was dissected using clips and scissors and the left NVB using the 1064 nm Nd:YAG laser (8 W, continuous-wave mode). In the subsequent four patients, the NVB was dissected bilaterally using the laser. The NVBs were excised…

  • You probably should perform a repeat biopsy after high grade pin (HGPIN)

    IngentaConnect The incidence of high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia a…: CONCLUSION: Identifying multifocal HGPIN on first saturation biopsy is associated with an overall cancer detection rate of 80% on repeat 10-12-core biopsy. Although there were few patients, the detection of multifocal HGPIN warrants additional searches for concurrent invasive carcinoma by repeated biopsy. The diagnosis of high…