Robotic spleen-preserving total gastrectomy for gastric cancer: comparison with conventional laparoscopic procedure

Background Robotic systems recently have been introduced to overcome technical limitations of conventional laparoscopic surgery, especially for complex procedures. Laparoscopic spleen-preserving total gastrectomy with D2 lymph node (LN) dissection (LTGD2) is one of the most complicated procedures. We hypothesized that robotic LN dissection would be more thorough and accurate. We compared robotic spleen-preserving total gastrectomy with D2 LN dissection (RTGD2) with LTGD2 to investigate the impact of robotics. Methods Clinicopathologic characteristics and short-term and long-term outcomes of RTGD2 ( n = 51) versus LTGD2 ( n = 58) in gastric adenocarcinoma patients were extracted from a prospectively designed database and analyzed retrospectively. Results There was no difference of patients’ characteristics between groups. Mean operation time of RTGD2 was longer than LTGD2 ( p