Robotic-assisted thoracic surgery for resectable lung cancer: efficacy, safety and surgical approaches - an umbrella review of meta-analyses.

[UNLABELLED] Lung cancer is still a tumor type with high incidence in the world. Although there are many treatment options for lung cancer, surgical resection is widely used for I-IIIA lung cancer. Video assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) has been proved to have significant intraoperative and postoperative and efficacy and safety advantages compared with traditional thoracotomy. Furthermore, current robotic assisted thoracic surgery (RATS) has created a new development chapter for minimally invasive lung surgery. RATS provides a series of advantages due to its advanced technology, such as three-dimensional vision, tenx magnification video imaging, and robotic arms that can simulate the degree of freedom of the human hand. Surgical participants allowed to dissect thoracic structures and lymph node resection during procedure more comfortably and accurately, thereby reducing blood loss and the possibility of intraoperative cardiac and respiratory accidents. This article combines the robotic surgery we have performed with the published researches about robotic lung cancer surgery, to further review the application, advantages and a series of challenges of RATS in lobectomy, segmentectomy, bronchial sleeve lobectomy (BSL), which surgeries required elaborate dissection of blood vessels, trachea and lymph nodes. It is expected to further explore the direction of RATS in the development of lung surgery.

[SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION] The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12893-026-03501-2.