Minimally invasive surgery for head and neck cancer

Minimally invasive surgery has been adopted in many areas of surgery to reduce patient morbidity during surgical resection. To achieve this, endoscopic instrumentation coupled with improved imaging and localisation techniques have been developed, to enable adequate resection of tumours with minimum damage to surrounding tissues. We review two emerging technologies, robotic assisted surgery and intraoperative imaging. We also discuss two fields of head and neck surgery, skull-base tumour resection and thyroidectomy, where the application of minimally invasive endoscopic techniques has been widely applied, and review their results.