Robotic-assisted Kidney Transplantation: Our Experience and Literature Review

Kidney transplantation is the preferred treatment for patients with end-stage renal disease. While open surgery remains the gold standard, minimally invasive surgery has recently been introduced for the recipient undergoing kidney transplantation. Our team has employed the robotic surgical system to perform renal transplantation in obese recipients to minimize the risk of surgical site infections, with good results in terms of complications and graft and patient survival. However, others groups have performed kidney transplantation robotically in nonobese patients using different techniques. The da Vinci surgical system allows the performance of kidney transplantation under optimal operative conditions. Larger studies and long-term follow-up of recipients are required to determine the effectiveness of this approach. In this article, we describe our experience and review the development of the robotic-assisted kidney transplantation (RAKT).