[Various Considerations on Robot-assisted Cardiac Surgery].

Robot-assisted cardiac surgery offers the most minimally-invasive approach to the surgical treatment of valvular heart disease and coronary artery disease. However, robot-assisted cardiac surgery is still far from being a standardized operation. We believe that with developing robotic technology, in the near future, robotic surgery will certainly play a key role in the field of cardiac surgery, thus tips and pitfalls for introducing robotic cardiac surgery and techniques of it should be described in more detail. After two years of our experience, we have performed about 200-cases of robot-assisted cardiac surgery, including robot-assisted mitral valve repair and minimally invasive coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). The safety and reliability of those procedures have been well described from outside Japan. However, in Japan, we are still standing at the dawn of the robot-assisted cardiac surgery era, thus various experiences should be published from each institution where the robot-assisted cardiac surgery has already standarized. Here we present our experiences and recent technical consideration of robot-assisted cardiac surgery using the da Vinci Xi surgical system.