In a first for Pune, DPU Private Super Specialty Hospital at Pimpri successfully performed a liver transplant using a robot.
At a media conference held Thursday, Dr Manisha Karmarkar, CEO of DPU Private Super Speciality Hospital, said that robotic living donor hepatectomy is a major breakthrough in liver transplant surgeries. “This procedure involves a minimally invasive liver surgery with an optimum safety margin and an easy return to normalcy with minimal surgery-induced pain and complications. The surgery was carried out using the fourth-generation Da Vinci Xi Robot surgical system that comes with highly advanced instrumentation and a vision range of 10x magnification of the surgical field with the ergonomic and tremor-free movement of the robotic arm,” Dr Karmarkar said.
Rarely done across some centres in Mumbai and other parts of the country, this is for the first time the robotic living donor liver transplant was successfully performed in Pune. Dr Vrishali Patil, Program Director and Head of Department, Multi-Organ Transplant Surgery, DPU Private Super Specialty Hospital, told The Indian Express that a 35-year-old farmer was suffering from chronic liver disease and urgently needed a transplant.
“The donor was the patient’s wife who after a detailed evaluation was found eligible to donate part of her liver and the robotic living donor liver transplant was performed on June 18,” Dr Patil added. The farmer’s 29-year-old wife requested a minimally invasive surgery and a quicker recovery period as they had a small child to be cared for, doctors said.
Due to the complexity of this case, a living donor transplant was the option and the donor underwent a robotic right liver hepatectomy surgery. Her right liver was transplanted to her husband. “Donor safety and recovery are our prime concerns and robotic surgery helped us achieve this goal. Both the patient and the donor displayed excellent results in recovery and were discharged within a week. The donor’s recovery process was easy, with barely any pain. There was no blood transfusion that was required in her surgery, and with mobility exercises and a healthy diet plan, she is back to her normal physical self, and her liver function is back to normal,” Dr Patil said.
