The Specific Role of Minimally Invasive Robotic Digestive Surgery

Robotic technology has proven to be safe and effective in many surgical fields with comparable or even better outcomes than conventional minimally invasive surgery for several oncological procedures. However, the widespread diffusion of robotic surgical systems has encouraged, despite their significant cost, an uncontrolled adoption of the robot-assisted approach that is being used by an increasing number of centers with low volume and poor experience. Recent publications have shown a strong inverse relationship between hospital caseload of robotic procedures and the related outcomes especially when performed for oncological indications. On this basis, the surgical community is calling for centralization of patients to high-volume centers. In this chapter the current available evidence on this topic is analyzed for specific fields of application.