-Review-

Current Status of Robotic Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery

Keisuke Minamimura¹, Yuto Aoki¹, Youhei Kaneya¹, Satoshi Matsumoto¹, Hiroki Arai¹, Daisuke Kakinuma¹, Yukio Oshiro¹, Yoichi Kawano¹, Masanori Watanabe¹, Yoshiharu Nakamura¹, Hideyuki Suzuki¹ and Hiroshi Yoshida²

¹Department of Surgery, Nippon Medical School Chiba Hokusoh Hospital, Chiba, Japan
²Department of Surgery, Nippon Medical School, Tokyo, Japan

Laparoscopic surgery is performed worldwide and has clear economic and social benefits in terms of patient recovery time. It is used for most gastrointestinal surgical procedures, but laparoscopic surgery for more complex procedures in the esophageal, hepatobiliary, and pancreatic regions remains challenging. Minimally invasive surgery that results in accurate tumor dissection is vital in surgical oncology, and development of surgical systems and instruments plays a key role in assisting surgeons to achieve this. A notable advance in the latter half of the 1990s was the da Vinci Surgical System, which involves master-slave surgical support robots. Featuring high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) imaging with magnification capabilities and forceps with multi-joint function, anti-shake function, and motion scaling, the system compensates for the drawbacks of conventional laparoscopic surgery. It is expected to be particularly useful in the field of hepato-biliary-pancreatic surgery, which requires delicate reconstruction involving complex liver anatomy with diverse vascular and biliary systems and anastomosis of the biliary tract, pancreas, and intestines. The learning curve is said to be short, and it is hoped that robotic surgery will be standardized in the near future. There is also a need for a standardized robotic surgery training system for young surgeons that can later be adapted to a wider range of surgeries. This systematic review describes trends and future prospects for robotic surgery in the hepatobiliary-pancreatic region.

J Nippon Med Sch 2024; 91: 10-19

Keywords
robotic surgery, hepato-biliary-pancreatic surgery

Correspondence to
Keisuke Minamimura, Department of Surgery, Nippon Medical School Chiba Hokusoh Hospital, 1715 Kamagari, Inzai, Chiba 270-1694, Japan
m-keisuke@nms.ac.jp

Received, February 19, 2023
Accepted, August 9, 2023