Saudi Arabia completes single-port robotic live donor partial liver resection surgery

King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Saudi Arabia announced on the 6th that it has successfully completed the world’s first series of single-incision robotic partial liver resections on living donors.

According to a statement released by the institution, the surgeries were performed through a single incision no more than 3.5 centimeters long, without the multiple incisions required for traditional robotic surgery, thereby alleviating post-operative pain and speeding up recovery while maintaining high safety standards. The statement said this marks a major advance in the field of organ transplantation.

The liver is an organ with strong self-regenerative ability. During liver transplantation, only a portion of the donor liver is typically transplanted into the recipient’s body, and after a period of time, the donor’s damaged liver regenerates and repairs back to the pre-surgery level.

Living donors are healthy individuals who undergo surgery for the benefit of others. Implementing single-incision robotic liver partial resections is especially important for protecting the safety and health of donors. The statement described that, in the surgeries performed on six donors, there was only a small amount of bleeding in all cases and no complications occurred; post-operative pain was lower, and patients could be discharged within 2 to 3 days.

The statement also noted that the technology can further make the process of providing a child recipient with donor liver safer, because in such cases the procedure usually involves removing the donor’s left lateral lobe of the liver, and the single-port approach is particularly suitable during resection, minimizing the surgical burden on the donor to the greatest extent possible. (Xinhua News Agency)