Oncologic outcomes of robotic thyroidectomy: 5-year experience with propensity score matching

Abstract

The oncologic outcome of robotic thyroidectomy in 5-year experience is comparable to that of conventional thyroidectomy in selected patients with PTC.

Factors affecting operative time in robotic thyroidectomy

“…Robotic thyroidectomy offers advantages over conventional transcervical thyroidectomy in terms of cosmetic excellence, and has comparable perioperative and oncologic outcomes. 11,19 However, the prolonged operative time is an issue of robotic thyroidectomy that robotic surgeons have not yet overcome, despite trying alternative approaches, such as transaxillary, bilateral axillary breast approach (BABA), and postauricular approaches. 15,17 Prolonged operation time involves increased costs and complication rates due to anesthesia in patients with medical problems other than thyroid disease.…”

“…We have been performing robotic and endoscopic thyroidectomies using a gasless unilateral axillary or a gasless unilateral axillo‐breast approach since 2005 . The oncologic outcomes, complication rates, and health‐related quality of life, including postoperative voice and swallowing of patients who have undergone robotic surgery are all comparable to those of patients undergoing conventional transcervical thyroidectomy . However, long operation times are a major weakness of robotic thyroidectomy despite the extensive experience of most robotic surgeons .…”

“…2,[4][5][6] The oncologic outcomes, complication rates, and health-related quality of life, including postoperative voice and swallowing of patients who have undergone robotic surgery are all comparable to those of patients undergoing conventional transcervical thyroidectomy. [7][8][9][10][11][12] However, long operation times are a major weakness of robotic thyroidectomy despite the extensive experience of most robotic surgeons. 4,[13][14][15][16] Accordingly, we considered that identifying the factors related to prolonged operation times might provide valuable information for selecting patients for robotic thyroidectomy.…”

Robotic Thyroid Surgery: Current Perspectives and Future Considerations

“…In terms of oncological efficacy, there are several recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses pooling data from studies collectively reporting on several thousand cases that illustrate that there is no significant difference between the robotic and open approaches in terms of serum thyroglobulin levels, post-ablation radioactive iodine scan uptake, lymph node yield, locoregional recurrence and survival rates, thus confirming the oncological value of robotic thyroidectomy for differentiated thyroid cancer (level 2a) [13, 21, 25, 26]. …”

“…The procedure proved to be popular among the local population, and its uptake was rapid in the Far East with thousands of cases performed over the subsequent years [11-13]. However, the uptake in the Western World has been significantly lower.…”