Telementoring in robotic surgery

Abstract

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: To provide an overview of the current concepts regarding telementoring with robotic surgery highlighting recent advances with respect to urological minimally invasive surgery (MIS). RECENT FINDINGS: As robotic surgery continues to evolve, telementoring will become a viable alternative to traditional on-site surgical proctoring. SUMMARY: MIS represents one of the most important breakthroughs in medicine over the past few decades. Newcomers to MIS need the guidance of more experienced, 'high volume' mentors to achieve the superior outcomes promised by MIS over conventional techniques.Telementoring, a subset of telemedicine, allows a surgeon at a remote site to offer intraoperative guidance via telecommunication networks. MIS lends itself well to telementoring techniques for several reasons; the primary surgeon performing MIS is working off of video images of the surgical field or images sent to a console. As such, the mentor is seeing the exact same images as the primary surgeon. In this review, we highlight many of the latest technologies in telemedicine, which are applicable to MIS and provide an overview of the pitfalls, which need to be overcome to make telementoring (and eventually telesurgery) a standard tool in the MIS arsenal.