Surgery is always a medical procedure with inherent risk. However, for cancer treatment, surgical options may be the most effective option in eradicating malignant tumors without painful side effects of chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Among the most serious risks associated with surgical treatment is the possibility of infection at the incision site(s).

These infections are often the leading causes of serious complications that can hinder your ability to recover quickly and properly from your procedure. The da Vinci System greatly mitigates the risk of infection in a number of ways. First, the size of the incision(s) is actually significantly smaller with robotic surgery than with the traditional procedure.

A non-robotic prostatectomy typically requires the surgeon to make a six- to eight-inch vertical incision in the patient's lower abdomen. A relatively large incision exposes the patient to a number of operative and infectious agents postoperatively. This means that not only is the open incision site susceptible to any infectious agents during the procedure, but also the unhealed wound closure that results from the incision may be at risk for harmful infections.

Postoperative infections are the most common of the two categories of infection risk, as are hospital rooms that cannot be maintained at the extremely high level of sterility that robotic-only operating rooms can provide. The da Vinci Robotic Surgical System, however, uses a much less invasive technique that requires four to five smaller incisions of two inches each. Each of these smaller incisions heals much faster than the six- to eight-inch incision required in traditional surgery. Fewer sutures are needed to close the robotic system's incisions. This speeds up recovery time, as well as being less painful for you as the patient.