Lung cancer patients, who at one time faced invasive operations followed by difficult recoveries, have found a new surgeon: a robot.
Doctors in Toronto are the first in Canada to employ a minimally invasive surgical technique to rid their patients of tumours in which they use controls at a nearby console to guide a robotic system inside the body.
The system, named da Vinci after the famed painter, lets surgeons be much more precise and cause much less trauma to their patients.
At Toronto General Hospital, doctors are using the robot to operate on their patients with early stage lung cancer. Rather than open a patient's chest and spread the ribcage, the surgeons can now make four small incisions in the chest through which they insert a small camera and their surgical instruments.
"For the surgeons, we can actually operate more precisely," Dr. Kazuhiro Yasufuku told CTV News. "We can see better. The images are 3-D images."
The technique allows surgeons to remove the tumour and any affected lymph nodes, and as little of the lung as possible, with minimal damage to the surrounding tissue.
In the end, patients usually have less pain and scarring after their surgery, as well as shorter hospital stays.
The technique was first used for prostate and gynecological surgeries, and the team at Toronto General has joined surgeons in Europe and the United States to use it for early stage lung cancer.
Stanley Skorpid says he was honoured to be among the first patients to undergo the procedure in Canada when he had surgery last October.
"(My doctor) told me otherwise there would be chemotherapy and all this, but he said it was strictly up to myself if I wanted it," Skorpid told CTV.
"I said ‘Well yes, I think I want to go for that.'"
Skorpid, who is now cancer-free, said he was back on his feet by the following day and returned to his concierge job within three weeks. He said the pain was minimal, and he has been able to engage in rigorous activities, such as shovelling snow.
Yasufuku said the procedure will also make treatment available to a greater number of patients. Some patients are considered too sick or weak to undergo the more invasive operation.
Toronto General's Dr. Shaf Keshavjee said the robotic technique is a stepping stone to even less invasive procedures.
"The future of surgery will likely be no incisions," he told CTV. "So as we continue to work can we actually operate on lung cancers through the mouth and not have to make any cut at all."
With a report from CTV's medical specialist Avis Favaro and producer Elizabeth St. Philip
