The aim of minimally invasive surgery is to reduce the surgical trauma, resulting in faster recovery, reduction in complications, and better quality of life after surgery.

Minimal access breast surgery offers comparable long-term outcomes to conventional surgery for women with stage 0–III breast cancer, show the results of a propensity-matched, retrospective cohort study.

Minimally invasive surgery rates were 30% for nivolumab plus chemotherapy and 22% for chemotherapy alone, with a corresponding 11% and 16% of patients converting from minimally invasive to open surgery.

Disease recurrence is more likely and overall survival worse for patients with stage I non-small-cell lung cancer who do not receive surgery within 12 weeks of radiographic diagnosis, research suggests.

He added: “This would represent substantial progress in the pursuit of an effective, minimally invasive treatment of patients affected by breast cancer.”

Most (79%) of the patients underwent lobectomy and just 15% of the 101 patients who had minimally invasive procedures required a conversion to thoracotomy.

Minimally invasive liver surgery is associated with less postoperative morbidity, fewer major complications, and shorter hospital stays than open surgery among patients with colorectal liver metastases, Italian researchers report.

Patients who undergo video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery for stage I non-small-cell lung cancer are less likely to become long-term opioid users than their counterparts undergoing the conventional open procedure, findings suggest.

Robot-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy and open radical retropubic prostatectomy have similar functional outcomes at 2 years, according to phase III study findings in The Lancet Oncology .

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy can be so effective at shrinking breast tumors in some patients that it has raised the possibility of avoiding surgery altogether. Henry Kuerer (MD Anderson, USA) discusses the exciting recent advances in this area.

Alternatively, for some cancer types, other minimally invasive samples may have a higher tumour DNA content than plasma: for example, urine for bladder cancers 56 ; stool for colorectal cancers 19 ; cytological specimens such as cervical smears 140 or uterine lavage 141 for gynaecological cancers, or oesophageal brushings 142 for oesophageal cancers (Fig. 3c).

“Our study showed that this technique can obtain equivalent functional outcomes to open surgery.”