[Current status and future prospect of robot-assisted radical prostatectomy]

Although radical retropubic prostatectomy had long been the mainstay as the surgical treatment for patients with localized prostate cancer, robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (RARP) has recently been achieving increasing acceptance, resulting in the leading option for treating such patients in the United States, and it has been progressively expanding in other countries, including Japan. To date, however, there have been limited data concerning prospective studies or randomized trials showing the superiority of RARP over other surgical approaches. In this review, we attempted to summarize the current status of RARP based on available evidence as well as the experience at our institution, and to discuss the future prospect of this novel system as a major surgical technique for localized prostate cancer.