Ronney Abaza, MD, FACS, on what’s coming down the pike in robotic surgery

In this video, Ronney Abaza, MD, FACS, expands on his presentation, “What’s New in Robotic Surgery?” which was shared during the 2024 LUGPA Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois. Abaza is a robotic urologic surgeon at Central Ohio Urology Group in Columbus, Ohio.

Video Transcript:

It's actually a very exciting time to be a robotic surgeon, because obviously robotic surgery is one of those fields that's very technology driven. So, there's constantly new innovations that are coming out from industry to both augment the actual robot that we use during surgery, but then all of these other ancillary devices that have been developed to go along with robotic surgery. Those are also constantly in flux with new things coming out. Then, most recently, the most exciting thing that's about to hit the pipeline are new robots. For about 2 decades, the only robot on the market was the Intuitive da Vinci. And the Da Vinci has also continued to evolve and get better and better with time. But there was really just 1 company out there that was making robots that we could use for surgery, especially here in the US, with very few exceptions. Now we're about to see a lot of different robots hitting the market.

For example, a couple years ago, the Senhance robot became FDA approved, but really didn't make many inroads here in the US simply because it's a larger robot. It has multiple different patient side carts, so basically 1 robot for each arm that you have to drive in and dock. They're pretty big and take up a lot of room in the OR. So, the Senhance robot really hasn't been adopted very much in the US. But most recently, CMR, which is a British company, was FDA approved just last month in October, and so that's about to hit the market here in the US. We'll see what that does in terms of adoption and use. It's a different model, because the robotic arms are actually mounted to the table, and they're not on a cart that you have to drive up to the patient. The CMR robot has actually been used pretty extensively already in Europe, with 1000s of procedures that have been done on it. So, it's a pretty well-vetted system that we know can be used on a routine basis for all the surgeries that we do. It will have a better chance of breaking into the market here in the US and giving Intuitive Surgical some competition. The third company that is pretty close to FDA approval here is Medtronic's robot, the Hugo robot. Medtronic, of course, is a huge company that does billions of dollars of business already in health care here in the US. So, whereas CMR is going to come into the market as a standalone robotic company, Medtronic is going to come to the market with their robot already having established relationships and tons and tons of business that they're doing with hospitals around the country. I think they're going to have an easier time getting the robots into the hospitals here in the US, and again, creating some competition on the market. And competition, of course, is always good because it gives options for surgeons in hospitals, but then it also pushes these companies to continue to innovate and really do a better job of providing the technology that we need to help our patients and better than the other companies. It gives them some motivation, in other words, to to give us better products.

We're really excited as robotic surgeons, because this will be the first time in a couple decades that there'll be competition for robots, and that's only going to make things better. It's going to make the robots better and drive these companies to give us better tools, and also incentivize other companies to, again, create those ancillary products that work along with the robots for robotic surgery, to give us a better chance of doing a great job for our patients. It's an exciting time again, because of all these innovations and new technologies that are coming out. The robots are getting smarter; they're getting better. Especially when it comes to some of these other topics that you're going to ask me about, there's some exciting developments happening, just like we see in other technology driven fields. Obviously, anything having to do with computers and technology, even cell phones and other technology is growing and developing, evolving by leaps and bounds. Everything technology-based evolves exponentially, not linearly. The cell phone that we use today compared to the one a year ago, is. Is exponentially better than the one that was 5 years before that. Technology is developing so quickly that we really expect to see some amazing developments with robotic surgery.

This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.