Robot-assisted thoracic surgery versus open thoracic surgery for lung cancer: a system review and meta-analysis

The aim of this meta-analysis is to compare the perioperative morbidity and mortality outcomes of robotic-assisted thoracic surgery (RATS) with open thoracic surgery (OTS) for patients with lung cancer. We searched articles indexed in the Pubmed and Sciencedirect published as of July 2015 that met our predefined criteria. A meta-analysis was performed by combining the results of reported incidences of perioperative morbidity and mortality. The relative risk (RR) was used as a summary statistic. Five eligible articles with 2433 subjects were considered in the analysis (5 articles for morbidity, while 3 articles for mortality). Overall, pooled analysis indicated that perioperative morbidity and mortality rate was significantly lower among patients who underwent RATS than patients who underwent OTS (for morbidity: RR, 0.83; 95% CI, 0.75 to 0.92; P<0.01; for mortality: RR, 0.14; 95% CI, 0.03 to 0.59; P=0.007). No evidence of publication bias was observed. In conclusion, this meta-analysis showed that RATS resulted in significantly lower perioperative morbidity and mortality rate compared with OTS cases. Thus, we suggest RATS be an appropriate alternative to OTS for lung cancer resection. RATS should be studied further in selected centers and compared with OTS in a randomized fashion to better define its potential advantages and disadvantages.