Patient Positioning for Robotic Pelvic Surgery

Proper patient positioning is one of the first step to avoid perioperative complications during surgery. This appears of pivotal importance especially during robotic assisted surgical procedures since the bulky robotic system requires not only “constrained positioning” of the patient in order to allow the robotic docking, but it also hides the patient to potential checks during the procedure itself. Herein we describe in details the technique of patient positioning and side docking of the robotic arm system routinely employed in our Institution for all cases of robotic pelvic surgery, including radical prostatectomy, radical cystectomy, urogynecological procedures, ureteric reimplantation. Since its introduction we did not experienced any patient positioning related complications and in all cases it was possible to complete the programmed robotic assisted surgical procedure without the need of changing patient position or the robotic docking.