Are Surgeons Working Smarter or Harder? A Systematic Review Comparing the Physical and Mental Demands of Robotic and Laparoscopic or Open Surgery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Minimally invasive surgical techniques such as robotic surgical platforms have provided favourable outcomes for patients, but the impact on surgeons is not well described. This systematic review aims to synthesize and evaluate the physical and mental impact of robotic surgery on surgeons compared to standard laparoscopic or open surgery. METHODS: A search strategy was developed to identify peer-reviewed English articles published from inception to end of December 2019 on the following databases: MEDLINE, PubMed, PsycINFO and Embase. The articles were assessed using a modified Newcastle-Ottawa tool. RESULTS: Of the 6563 papers identified, 30 studies were included in the qualitative synthesis of this review. Most of the included studies presented a high risk of bias. A total of 13 and 21 different physical and mental tools, respectively, were used to examine the impact on surgeons. The most common tool used to measure physical and mental demand were surface electromyography (N = 9) and the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX; N = 8), respectively. Majority of studies showed mixed results for physical (N = 10) and mental impact (N = 7). This was followed by eight and six studies favouring RS over other surgical modalities for physical and mental impact, respectively. CONCLUSION: Most studies showed mixed physical and mental outcomes between the three surgical modalities. There was a high risk of bias and methodological heterogeneity. Future studies need to correlate mental and physical stress with long-term impact on the surgeons.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".