14 Surgeons And A Robot Carried Out 3 Stages Of A Surgery At The Same Time

Dhir Acharya - Sep 23, 2020

Robots have assisted doctors and surgeons for a while now. But this is the first time a robot and surgeons have worked alongside to reduce surgery time.

For the first time ever, three teams of surgeons and a robot worked to carry out 3 different stages of operation simultaneously with the aim of reducing the surgery and recovery time in a cancer procedure by a third.

Fourteen surgeons conducted the procedure back in July on a patient suffering from advanced rectal cancer. The team hopes similar operations could be done in the future to finish procedures faster.

The surgeons used a Da Vinci robot bought at Norwich University Hospital. It allows for performing procedures with exceptional accuracy with much smaller incisions compared with traditional methods.

According to the Daily Mail, the procedure took less than 10 hours to complete, as opposed to 12 hours if it was conducted in separate steps. The three teams of surgeons worked alongside throughout the procedure. Irshad Shaikh, a colorectal surgeon, explained:

“Pelvic exenteration are extremely traumatic because so much tissue has to be removed. Working together, we realized we could make the procedure less invasive and so could reduce tissue trauma significantly and blood loss.”

Currently, this bowel cancer operation is still carried out in three shifts. The first one is a bowel doctor, the second one is a prostate specialist, and the third one involves plastic surgeons to finish up by fixing the damage caused during the procedure.

Even more impressively, it took the patient 7 days to recover while the conventional method usually takes 3 weeks for recovery. The surgeons hope that this will pave the way for medical practices worldwide to develop new methods for robot-assisted procedures.