Mission of the Program in Minimally Invasive and Robotic Urologic Surgery

The current trend in urologic medicine is to treat disorders of the urinary tract with as little disruption to the patient’s body as possible. Taking advantage of advances in computer technology and digital imaging, ‘minimally invasive’ techniques allow surgeons to treat cancers, cysts, and obstructions of the urinary tract using very small incisions. The overarching goal of these techniques is to cure disease with a minimum of bodily trauma.

The Program in Minimally Invasive and Robotic Urologic Surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center is committed to evaluating and improving these new minimally invasive technologies for the treatment of complex urologic diseases. Our current focus is on robotic urologic surgery and ablative techniques. Research in these two areas of medicine has resulted in treatments that would have been unimaginable just 20 years ago.

Robotic surgery

Robotic surgery is an extension of laparoscopy, in which surgical procedures are performed using small instruments and a miniature camera placed into the body through small incisions. With computerized robotic assistance, four multi-jointed robotic arms are controlled in real time by one surgeon. This technology allows for three-dimensional, high-definition stereoscopic optics, six degrees of instrument wrist motion and scaled-down movement of surgical tools. At NYU Langone, robotic surgery is used to treat prostate cancer, kidney cancer and other diseases of the kidney.

Ablative techniques

Ablative techniques use focused heat, cold or radio waves to destroy cancerous cells in the organ where they are growing, without traditional surgical incisions. Methods include cryosurgery (destroying cancer with extreme cold), high-intensity focused ultrasound or HIFU (killing cancer cells with heat produced by high-energy sound waves) and interstitial photodynamic therapy (treating cancer with a chemical that makes the cells very sensitive to light). At NYU Langone, we are evaluating and using these ablative techniques to treat kidney and prostate cancer.

Our mission

The mission of the Program in Minimally Invasive and Robotic Urologic Surgery is to objectively evaluate the strengths and limitations of these two areas of urologic medicine, to define their role in the treatment paradigms of the future, and to disseminate this knowledge to others.