Robotic gastrectomy versus laparoscopic gastrectomy for gastric cancer: meta-analysis and trial sequential analysis of prospective observational studies

Background To evaluate short- and long-term outcomes of robotic gastrectomy (RG) in patients with gastric cancer to determine whether RG is an acceptable alternative to laparoscopic gastrectomy (LG). Methods PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and Chinese Biomedical Database were searched for prospective observational studies (POSs) comparing RG with LG for gastric cancer until October 2017. We compared short-term and long-term outcomes using systematic review with meta-analysis and trial sequential analysis (TSA). Results Sixteen POSs including 4576 patients were included in the meta-analyses. Compared with LG, RG had longer operative time (MD 57.98 min, P