Robotic-assisted surgery can often feel like a technology straight from the world of sci-fi. Units with multiple articulating arms, sometimes operated by surgeons in separate rooms, can make these systems feel completely alien to traditional open surgery methods. And this image can present a hurdle to patients (and even some surgeons) for fear that the technology is too new and not tried and tested enough.

But as any seasoned robotic surgeon will tell you, robotics is just the next evolutionary step in surgery. From open surgery, to laparoscopic, to robotics, the ways in which operations are carried out are always changing, adopting new technologies and ever-better techniques.

In our season finale of Surgical Robo-Talks, we’ll be finding out how this surgical discipline has developed and how it’s making its mark on the surgical world with help from consultant colorectal surgeon and president-elect of the Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland, Jared Torkington. Our co-host today is consultant colorectal surgeon at University Hospital Limerick and past vice president of the Association of Surgeons in Training, Christina Fleming.

They’ll discuss how advances in laparoscopic surgery paved the way for robotic-assisted surgery and explore how the two were both received by the medical community when they first emerged. Plus, we’ll learn how robotic-assisted surgery could be incorporated into colorectal surgical training and ask what advances we might see in robotics in the coming years.

We’ll also ask:

• (3:24) - How did laparoscopic surgery go from experimental practice to mainstream method?
• (5:56) – What caused the change in approach to laparoscopic surgery in the 1990s?
• (8:29) – Where does Jared feel the benefits lie in robotic-assisted colorectal surgery?
• (11:18) – How do you explain to patients that robotic-assisted surgery is just a progression from laparoscopic surgery and open surgery?
• (13:43) - Where was Jared when robotic-assisted surgery first appeared in soft-tissue surgery? And what was the general feeling towards it?
• (16:03) - Are more randomized trials needed to verify the success rates and benefits of robotics?
• (18:51) - Should registries be a standard part of robotic-assisted surgery?
• (20:52) – What do surgeons think about participating in registries?
• (24:09) – How should robotics be incorporated into robotic-assisted surgical training?
• (26:26) – Should surgical trainees be trained given the plethora of robotics platforms available?
• (29:36) - How could robotic-assisted surgical training be introduced in parallel to the current training systems?
• (35:06) - How could robotic-assisted surgery and its adoption evolve over the next five years?