Robotic-assisted total or partial nephrectomy

Robotic surgery has undergone exponential development in recent years throughout the world and is increasingly used in the surgical treatment of cancer. One of the fields where it has proven to have the most important advantages over the classic open or laparoscopic approach is in the treatment of kidney cancer, being the preferred treatment in the best urological cancer treatment centers in the world.

The urologist performs the partial nephrectomy by operating with the Da Vinci robot through small holes in the skin with very sophisticated instruments. These allow increased precision in the dissection of the kidney (easier to control vessels neoformed by the tumor, to perform a selective clamping of the artery that nourishes the tumor and to move and hold the kidney during surgery). The Da Vinci robot also facilitates the use of robot-guided intraoperative ultrasound to precisely delimit the location of tumors within the kidney and the use of intraoperative fluorescence, which makes it possible to visualize the blood supply to the tissues and to assess whether selective clamping of a branch of the renal artery is sufficient to safely remove the tumor.

After tumor removal, the Da Vinci Robot allows the urologist to reconstruct the kidney in record time (sometimes as little as 5 minutes), reducing arterial clamping time and the time during which the kidney is subjected to lack of irrigation and absence of oxygen, preserving renal function much better than conventional techniques.

Many recent studies have demonstrated the greater capacity of robotic surgery to treat deeper tumors, tumors in the renal hilum (next to the main blood vessels of the kidney), tumors that invade the excretory tract, larger tumors and multiple tumors in the population with hereditary renal disease, with much greater simplicity than open or conventional laparoscopic surgery.