Robotic prostatectomy: what we have learned and where we are going.

Radical prostatectomy became a mainstay of treatment for prostate cancer in the United States after the pioneering work of Walsh in defining the nerve sparing technique. Efforts to reproduce this operation in a minimally invasive fashion resulted in slow progress that recently have flourished with the application of the daVinci Surgical System (Intuitive Surgical, Sunnyvale, CA, USA) by Menon and colleagues. This article summarizes the origins of robotic prostatectomy, some of the current data regarding this operation and potential future directions.