Thoracic surgery is the name for the specialty that treats all sorts of disease processes in the chest. We're not focusing primarily on the heart, we're treating all of the other organs in the chest such as lungs, esophagus, thymus, chest wall, ribs, any place that we can have an abnormality, we're here to offer treatment. 

Traditionally for lung surgery we used to make an open incision and spread the ribs to adequately access the lung for removal. The risk of having post thoracotomy pain or pain lasting for longer than three months was unfortunately higher than we would like. Here at our institution, we've been using robotic surgery as a form of minimally invasive surgery for thoracic to create less pain for patients, reduced hospital time, and overall faster recovery. Robotics thoracic surgery offers advancements that other minimally invasive platforms don't have. Increased visual optics, as well as increased precision with the instrument movements. All of these things that allow us to do more technically challenging cases and offer a wider variety of patients access to minimally invasive surgery. Focusing on small incisions where there's no spreading of the ribs whatsoever significantly reduces that pain along the chest wall for patients.

Of the many different diseases and the chest which are treatable with robotic thoracic surgery, the most common one that we treat is lung cancer. Lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer-related deaths each year. One of the reasons that lung cancer is the number one cancer killer for men and women in the United States is because lung cancer tends to be found at a later stage. The reason for that is early stage lung cancers, patients generally have no symptoms. So if they have a nodule or a lung mass, if they're in the periphery or the outer part of the lung, patients won't have any symptoms at all until they get big enough to cause a pneumonia or some bleeding or something along those lines. 

Here at Mayo Clinic, we're really focused on providing comprehensive cancer care for lung cancer. And that includes everything from lung cancer screening, which can be the first step to diagnostic workup, including a biopsy all the way through surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatments. What robotic bronchoscopy has allowed us to do is to drive as far into the periphery of the airways, into the periphery of the lung as we want to with vision. The vision, in my opinion with robotic bronchoscopy has made all the difference in the world. We're able to actually get to lesions that are smaller than we would have ever even tried before. 

I lost my mother, my father, my sister and my brother and they’re all in their 40s and 50s from lung cancer. So it's just one of those things you just wait to hear that you have it. And that was pretty devastating. But when I saw Dr. Beamer and found out that they can do robotic surgery, I knew I was in the right hands. I live each day as if it's the fullest. I learned that early in life because of losing my mother. She had to have her lung removed. But back then they didn't do robotic surgery. So that was major surgery. I remember her being tied up for quite a while. And with robotic surgery, this is no lie, I went to Disney two weeks later with my grandkids. So that goes to show you. 

We're getting to the point where we can treat smaller and smaller lung cancers. And what gives me hope is that we're going to have a cure for lung cancer in my lifetime. I believe that. Robotic surgery is transforming the thoracic surgery experience from smaller incisions, shorter hospital times to quicker recovery and people regaining their life back. We are focused on providing high-quality care for our patients and we are excited about the future in lung cancer care.