Background: Robotic gastrectomy (RG) has been developed to address the drawbacks of laparoscopic gastrectomy (LG); however, whether or not RG is superior to conventional LG remains to be seen. The present study aimed to clarify the impact of RG on clinical stage I/II gastric cancer patients.
Methods: The present study included 1208 patients with clinical stage I/II gastric cancer who had minimally invasive gastrectomy from January 2012 to March 2020 at the Shizuoka Cancer Center. The short- and long-term outcomes of RG and LG were compared after propensity score matching.
Results: This study involved 835 LG and 345 RG patients. After propensity score matching, there were 342 patients each in the RG and LG groups, with an improved balance of confounding factors between the two groups. RG was associated with a significantly longer operative time and lower amylase concentration in the drainage fluid on the first postoperative day than LG. Furthermore, the incidence of intra-abdominal infectious complications in the RG was lower than that in the LG (4.4% vs. 9.4%; P = 0.015). The survival of the RG and LG groups was equivalent.
Conclusions: RG reduced the risk of intra-abdominal infectious complications in comparison with LG in the propensity score-matched analysis. Patients treated by the two approaches showed equivalent survival.