Robotic Mediastinal Surgery

The robotic platform can be viewed as an advanced thoracoscopic instrument and can be utilized for any pathology amenable to thoracoscopic surgery. This ultimately comes down to surgeon comfort, but many have demonstrated the robotic approach to be useful in benign and malignant mediastinal disease in all compartments with at least equivalent-if not superior-outcomes compared to sternotomy for many metrics. There are various robotic approaches to the same compartments (such as with thymectomy), and no one robotic approach has proven superior to another. Here we describe our robotic approach to common mediastinal pathology.