Two teenagers have become the first pediatric patients in Canada to have a robot-assisted kidney transplant, thanks to a University of Alberta Hospital surgeon.
Dr. Max Levine, the surgical director of the University of Alberta Hospital’s Kidney Transplant Program and his team have performed roughly 20 kidney transplants using the robot-assisted technique, starting with adult patients with living donors in 2024.
Because of the success they have seen in those less risky surgeries, they have moved on to more complex cases involving two high-risk pediatric patients, each with deceased donors.
“There’s extra complexity with deceased donors,” Levine explained. “By doing these unscheduled (robot-assisted transplants), we’re asking our overnight and on-call nursing staff who don’t normally use the robot… to apply that in an unscheduled fashion.”
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“To use this system on short notice, on an on-call basis for a specific procedure is a novel concept in our hospital and our health care system,” he said.
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“It’s pretty groundbreaking.”
The da Vinci Xi Robotic Surgical system looks kind of like someone is playing an extremely high-stakes video game, with the console controlling robotic arms inside of a patient.
It allows for much smaller incisions than traditional open surgeries, which means less pain for patients, a quicker recovery time, and a lower risk of infection and complications.
“I’ve seen how much of a strain complications have on patients and their families and the health care system in general, so it makes me feel happy to show that, as a program, we’re doing things to make these patients’ outcomes as good as possible,” Dr. Levine said.
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Alberta Health Services said among the 20 robot-assisted transplant cases so far, “there have been no complications — and most patients required no pain control other than regular-strength Tylenol after the first few days.”
When using traditional open surgery, about 10 per cent of patients need to return to hospital because of wound-related complications.
“I’m really happy for all of our recipients who got to experience the benefits of this procedure,” Dr. Levine said.
“It truly is a gamechanger for patients who are high-risk.”
To learn more about organ and tissue donation, visit GiveLifeAlberta.ca
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