Laparoscopic rectal surgery has demonstrated its superiority over the open approach, however it still has some technical limitations that lead to the development of robotic platforms. Nevertheless the literature on this topic is rapidly expanding there is still no consensus about benefits of robotic rectal cancer surgery over the laparoscopic one. For this reason a review of all the literature examining robotic surgery for rectal cancer was performed. Two reviewers independently conducted a search of electronic databases (PubMed and EMBASE) using the key words "rectum", "rectal", "cancer", "laparoscopy", "robot". After the initial screen of 266 articles, 43 papers were selected for review. A total of 3013 patients were included in the review. The most commonly performed intervention was low anterior resection (1450 patients, 48.1

作者：Fabio, Staderini；Caterina, Foppa；Alessio, Minuzzo；Benedetta, Badii；Etleva, Qirici；Giacomo, Trallori；Beatrice, Mallardi；Gabriele, Lami；Giuseppe, Macrì；Andrea, Bonanomi；Siro, Bagnoli；Giuliano, Perigli；Fabio, Cianchi

来源：World journal of gastrointestinal oncology 2016 年 8卷 11期