The Robotic Surgeon Blog

  • 5 basic questions to ask your robotic surgeon

    Robotic Prostate Surgery – What Men Need To Know I came across this article on the web and can answer this for my practice: “If you are considering robotic prostate surgery over traditional open surgery, you should make the following questions part of your doctor-screening process: * How long have you been performing prostate surgery…

  • Haptics in the news

    “It always helps to be able to feel what you are doing, to feel the tissue tension and to feel the force when manipulating a suture,” says Domenico Savatta, chief of minimally invasive and robotic urology surgery at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. “Haptics would make it easier to learn robotic surgery, operate on things…

  • Robotic stories for BPH- Robotic Simple Prostatectomy

    I am starting a new blog series where patients can discuss their stories. Please understand that anyone can view this and as always patient outcomes can be different. The thoughts shared on this web site are not in any way meant to represent the surgeons, but are a way for people to share their experiences…

  • I was worried I was the first to perform a radical prostatectomy on an 80 year old man

    Men older than 80 years can undergo successful prostatectomy – UrologyTimes Radical prostatectomy can be a reasonable option for select octogenarian patients, according to researchers from the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN. I saw back my oldest robotic prostate patient today. He is 80 years old and had surgery 3 months ago. He looked great and…

  • Survival advantage with surgery for elderly patients with prostate cancer?

    JAMA — Survival Associated With Treatment vs Observation of Localized Prostate Cancer in Elderly Men, December 13, 2006, Wong et al. 296 (22): 2683 Conclusions This study suggests a survival advantage is associated with active treatment for low- and intermediate-risk prostate cancer in elderly men aged 65 to 80 years. Because observational data cannot completely…

  • Improvement in positive margins with robotic surgery

    Robotic Prostatectomy can reduce positive margins Source- Surgery News p. 13 This was an abstract presented at SLS meeting in Boston in September. The 2 urologists showed a dramatic improvement in positive margins from their last 100 prostatectomies done open to the first 93 done robotically. The organ confined changes for each surgeon were 37%…

  • Pediatric Robotic Surgery

    There is an excellent website on robotic pediatric surgery. The surgery is performed using robotic technology by John Meehan, MD and assisted by Anthony Sandler, MD of the University of Iowa. They have a lot of videos of their surgical procedures available for viewing.

  • Surgeon influence on prostate cancer outcomes

    UroToday – Prostate Cancer Surgery Outcomes: Surgeon Dependent Factors “Subgroup analysis showed superior recurrence free survival for patients treated by surgeons with greater than 1,000 operations compared to less than 50 operations. After 250 surgeries, the curves plateau.” This was a presentation by one of the worlds best prostate cancer surgeons, Dr. Peter Scardino. Pertinent…

  • Watchful waiting vs. definitive therapy

    UroToday – What is the Best Approach for Screen-Detected Low Volume Cancers? What is the Best Approach for Screen-Detected Low Volume Cancers? BETHESDA, MD (SUO 7th Annual Meeting – December 1-2, 2006:NIH) – In a session moderated by Dr. Eric Klein, Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Laurence Klotz, University of Toronto presented the “The Case for Observation”.…