Mount Sinai is the first institution in the New York metropolitan area to offer robotic assisted breast reconstruction.
“As part of the breast cancer treatment process, even before the reconstruction starts, women already acquire many physical scars as well as psychological scars,” says Alice Yao, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “So during the reconstruction process, we are happy to be able to offer a method that could decrease the burden of additional scars. We’re using the da Vinci robot. It has already been used quite widely by other fields such as urology and gynecology. However today it is not commonly used by the field of plastic surgery.”
“The best candidates for this robotic procedure and breast reconstruction are patients who need to recruit their own tissue from their own body after they’ve had radiation treatment,” she says. “Some of the most popular procedures in this case are using tissue transfer from the abdomen, or using tissue transfer from the back. The robot comes into play when we have patients who do not want large donor site scars on their body from these procedures. Therefore we can use the robot to use a minimally invasive method of harvesting tissues in order to enhance the breast reconstruction.”
Dr. Yao adds, “I think the robot has quite a few benefits, both aesthetic and functional, starting with the cosmetic benefits. It leads to a much smaller scar, five to eight centimeters, as opposed to the traditional incision, which would be 15 to 45 centimeters. Secondly, for functional benefits, the smaller wound leads to less pain, fewer potential complications, and a shorter recovery. We want patients who have breast cancer to be aware that this is another option that they have.”