Advantages and disadvantages of robotic surgery

Disadvantages
Robots are expensive to do surgery, with a maximum cost of $1.3 million per medical robot. There are fewer than 300 hospitals around the world that can perform robotic surgery, so the cost of robotic surgery cannot be reduced quickly. Using a robot to perform a prostatectomy can increase the cost of a comparable doctor's regular surgery by $1000; the cost of a heart mitral valve surgery will increase by $4000. In 2004, robots performed 8000 prostatectomies, accounting for 10% of the total prostatectomies.
Advantages
The main advantage of surgical robots is the ability to perform minimally invasive surgery through small incisions. [12] In general, open surgery requires blood transfusions, which carry the risk of infectious diseases, while robotic surgery causes very little bleeding. For general open surgery, it takes 2 to 3 days for the patient to be discharged from the hospital, and it takes 6 weeks to resume normal activities. After the robot operation, the patient can be discharged within 1 day and can perform normal activities after 1 week.
In addition, taking prostatectomy as an example, if the operation is wrong and the nerves around the prostate are cut off, impotence can be caused. Therefore, precise incision is very important. 25% to 60% of patients with ordinary prostatectomy suffer from impotence. However, the use of robot surgery, postoperative patients suffering from impotence rate is very low.
Cardiac surgeons use robots to perform operations, such as mitral valve repair and arterial surgery, without opening ribs. The patient's incision is only 3.7 to 5cm, instead of the 20 to 25cm incision of traditional surgery, which not only reduces the patient's pain, but also reduces bleeding and trauma.