That's why such robotic surgery is considered a type of "minimally invasive surgery." Minimally-invasive surgery with robots is not identical to traditional "open" surgery. Open surgery is when you make a large incision in the body. This trial randomly assigned over 600 patients with early stage cervical cancer to get either minimally invasive surgery (319 patients) or open surgery (312 patients). A smaller percentage (91.2%) of the minimally invasive surgery group were free of cancer after three years than those in the open surgery group (97.1%) as well.

Source: Forbes March 02, 2019 14:03 UTC