The Advantages of Robotic Over Open Thyroidectomy in Thyroid Diseases: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Over a hundred thousand thyroid surgeries are performed per year in the United States. Although conventional thyroidectomy has successful surgical outcomes, robotic minimally invasive procedures, known for their scar free (regarding the neck, no collar incision) surgical outcomes gained popularity through the years. Furthermore, these techniques are new and still debatable. The purpose is to know the advantages of robotic over open thyroidectomy in thyroid diseases. Note that we didn't aim to compare different robotic techniques due to the lack of data. We performed a systematic review comparing surgical approaches for thyroidectomy, open vs robotic techniques, from January 2017 to December 2021, according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines. All papers with no full free article access and not in the English language were excluded. The outcomes of interest were superior cosmetics outcome, cost-effectiveness, limitations, operation time, length of hospital stay and postoperative pain or complications, and future outcomes. A literature search was carried out in electronic databases (PubMed, Google Scholar) in order to retrieve all papers comparing the effectiveness of robotic vs open thyroidectomy. An initial reference search yielded 433 articles. Finally, we chose nine studies covering different robotic thyroidectomy techniques compared to the open thyroidectomy approach. Promising results were seen in these studies, especially with superior cosmetic results, less post-operative pain, swallowing discomfort, and voice changes. In addition, the risk of recurrent laryngeal nerve injury is almost the same as the open approach. Multiple types of biases were caused by the selection of the population and the limitation of the studies to certain regions associated with the low numbers of robotic thyroidectomy approaches in Europe and the United States of America and the lack of randomized trials and long-term follow-up respectively. All studies discussed the importance of the surgeon's skills and the patient decision in choosing the appropriate approach for the thyroidectomy depending on the risk factors, a larger number of patients, and longer follow-up from multiple hospitals.