XII Congress Brazilian Society of Surgery Oncology

Robotic surgery in colorectal cancer

Dr Daniel Cesar - National Institute of Cancer, Brazil

We started doing robotic surgery in the National Cancer Institute in 2012 and since then we’ve performed many types of surgery but mainly in the abdominal department it’s colorectal cancer. The gynaecologists do it for but in our department it’s mainly for colorectal cancer. Since we started very recently we tried to get some data and compare them with our own results, with open total mesorectal excision and laparoscopic total mesorectal excision. What we find is that the results for robotic surgery are better than the laparoscopic which is also better than the open surgery.

Which treatments do you recommend?

This was just a small paper, to validate this data we should perform a randomised clinical trial but the robotic surgery can bring very good oncological outcomes and it’s compared to the open surgery and the laparoscopic surgery. I cannot affirm which one is better but the robotic surgery has a promising future.

How could this apply to the clinical practice?

With this study in the National Cancer Institute we can keep performing the rectal cancer, for robotic surgery for rectal cancer, since it’s safe and it has short-term oncological outcomes that are better than laparoscopic and open surgery. So we can realise the safety in the robotic surgery and we can keep doing robotic surgery.

What are your long-term predictions?

Since our short-term outcomes point for good outcomes in the robotic group we believe that long-term outcomes should also follow the same results.