Washington University of St. Louis and Barnes-Jewish Hospital performed the first successful liver transplant surgery primarily using robots to perform the operation. Dr. Adeel Khan was the lead surgeon on the team, which was executed at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. The surgery took about 8 hours to complete, which is within the average time humans conduct the surgery (6-10 hours) but was a lot less invasive, which will hopefully dramatically increase patient survivability after surgery.
From Techexplorist.com:
Traditionally, a surgeon would make a 3- to 4-inch vertical and 12- to 16-inch horizontal incision just below the rib cage to remove a patient’s diseased liver and place the healthy donated liver. During the surgery to remove them, diseased livers are prone to excessive bleeding. Also, attaching the new liver to the patient’s circulatory system requires delicately sewing several tiny blood vessels together. This is why it had been thought to be too difficult to perform in a less invasive manner.
Robotic surgeries are a kind of minimally invasive surgery. During this successful robotic liver transplant, the surgeons operated through several half-inch keyhole incisions and made a single 6-inch vertical incision between the abdominal muscles to remove the diseased organ and place the new liver.
Khan reported, “The transplant was a success: The operation went smoothly, the new liver started working right away, and the patient recovered without any surgical complications.”
Even though the surgery took about the same amount of time as traditional surgery, the team believes they can reduce the time significantly as they get used to the new parameters of robot-assisted surgeries.
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