Bariatric Surgery by Robots

The much coveted Bariatric surgery for obesity has recently entered the robotics era in the city with Apollo Hospitals. Robot-assisted techniques have been introduced and these are considered as a better option or alternative to laparoscopy. However, these are also thought to be more expensive.

Dr. Rajkumar Palaniappan, consultant, Apollo Hospital, Addressed a press conference recently and stated that the latest robotic surgery offered excellent results as compared to laparoscopy. The basic downside of this project was that it would cost at least `1.75 lakh more as compared to a laparoscopic procedure.

There are numerous benefits of robotic surgery including supreme precision, enhanced ergonomic flexibility of the robotic arm in a body of patient, less amount of blood loss, pain score reaching 4/10 as compared to 6/10 for laparoscopy. Another benefit is that one can expect faster turnaround time for the patient.

Robotic-assisted surgery has applications for all 3 standard bariatric surgery conventions. These include sleeve gastrectomy, gastric band, and gastric bypass. Luckily, the hospital is also looking forward to tap into the various other benefits of robotic surgery. Th major one is remote location process via a surgeon sitting right at the computer console in the city of Chennai operating on a patient in Kolkata.

Apollo Hospital, has already presented robotic-assisted process for urology and gynaecology, is also targeting to establish robotic equipment at more of its epicentres.

Getting adept training in this speciality is quite easy as a good surgeon capable of picking robotic-assisted surgery skills within a year or so. Dr. Palaniappan said that, it takes about 5-6 years for an open process surgeon to master laparoscopy, Dr. Palaniappan said. It was projected towards starting a training curriculum in robotic bariatric surgical procedure. A patient from Scotland, Michael Cameron, mentioned that he decided to undertake robotic bariatric surgery at Apollo as his efforts at dietary control failed to provide a lasting clarification to his obesity.