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J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2008;136:237-238
© 2008 The American Association for Thoracic Surgery

Letter to the Editor

Robotic cardiac surgery: Give it more time!

^a Department of Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, Calif
^b San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Francisco, Calif

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

To the Editor:

We read with great interest a recent editorial by Dr Francis Robicsek regarding his perception that robotic cardiac surgery has essentially been a failure.¹ The data presented are excellent and support the conclusion that robotic cardiac surgery has not to date been as widely adopted as some predicted. His unrelenting assault on robotic cardiac surgery does reflect the view of many cardiac surgeons² and must be seriously considered. But is he correct in dismissing such a once-promising technology so soon?

We too have had concerns about robotic cardiac surgery: that it has been used by many as a marketing tool, that a thoracotomy is more painful than a sternotomy, that the operations can be done more easily with endoscopic approaches, and that operative . . . [Full Text of this Article]