Minimally Invasive Surgery: Clinical Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

Modern laparoscopy was introduced in the 1980s by Kurt Semm. Since then, minimally invasive surgery has become the approach of choice for most common surgical procedures due to its advantages, such as a shorter hospital stays and faster recovery times. With the advent of minimally invasive robotic surgery in the early 2000s, not to mention its more widespread use, minimally invasive techniques are also becoming increasingly used for complex procedures. However, the more regulard use of minimally invasive procedures also poses novel clinical and educational challenges:

• Their use in surgical oncology is still controversial since sufficient long-term data regarding oncological outcome are still lacking for many malignancies.
• The advantages of the commonly much more expensive robotic surgery compared to conventional minimally invasive surgery are still unclear.
• Teaching resident surgeons laparoscopic and even more so robotic procedures poses significant challenges. Structured teaching programs are still in development in many countries.
• Many complex procedures in the upper gastrointestinal tract are associated with a steep learning curve and can probably only be taught in high-volume centers. It is therefor unclear how to make these advantageous techniques available to all patients in need of these procedures.
• Minimally invasive surgery also poses novel challenges regarding inttraoperative complication management due to its differences comapred to the conventional open approach.

We therefore aim try to answer some of these open questions in this Special Issue, entitled “Minimally Invasive Surgery: Clinical Challenges”, and hope you will contribute an article.

Prof. Dr. Dirk Bausch
Guest Editor

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• minimally invasive surgery
• laparoscopic surgery
• robotic surgery
• teaching minimally invasive surgery
• teaching robotic surgery
• complication management
• oncological minimally invasive surgery