Robotic thoracic surgery: S1+2 segmentectomy of the left upper lobe: advantage of robotic assisted thoracic surgery

Abstract

We are grateful for the reviewers’ comments on our manuscript entitled “Robotic thoracic surgery: S1+2 segmentectomy of the left upper lobe” (1). An advantage of robotic assisted thoracic surgery (RATS) is that the robotic arms are flexible and allow the surgeon to move instruments freely inside the chest cavity as needed without geometric limitations. Compared with single-incision video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS), the flexibility is one of the primary advantages of robotic surgery. Although the literature revealed that RATS does not seem to offer any advantages over VATS with regards to complications, postoperative pain, hospital stay, and oncological outcome for early-stage lung cancer (2,3), the benefit of RATS is that the surgeon feels more comfortable and confident when performing RATS.