The Future and Hurdles of Robotic Liver Surgery

Since the very first series report by Giulianotti and colleagues on robotic approach for liver resections published in 2011 [1], the role of robotics in liver surgery evolved significantly moving from a pure resective to a reconstructive tool. As a matter of fact, in just 10 years the community of surgeons expanded the opportunities of application of the robotic platform with its pioneering work, achieving sensational results like the first liver transplantation with robotic approach [2]. In between, technical refinements and growing experience led to the demonstration of comparable short-term and long-term outcomes versus the standard open approach. Nonetheless there are still margins for the optimization of robotic surgical platforms in the treatment of liver diseases.