A comparison of surgical outcomes between endoscopic and robotically assisted thyroidectomy: the authors’ initial experience

Background: The gasless, transaxillary endoscopic thyroidectomy (GTET) offers a distinct advantage over the conventional open operation by leaving no visible neck scar, and in an attempt to improve its ergonomics and surgical outcomes, the robotically assisted thyroidectomy (RAT) was introduced. The RAT uses the same endoscopic route as the GTET but with the assistance of the da Vinci S robotic system. Excellent results for RAT have been reported, but it remains unclear whether RAT offers any potential benefits over GTET. Methods: From June to December 2009, 46 patients underwent endoscopic thyroidectomy. Of these patients, 39 had surgery without the robot (GTET) and 7 had surgery with the robot (RAT). Demographics, surgical indications, operative findings, and postoperative outcomes were compared between the two groups. All the patients were followed up for at least 6 months after surgery. Results: Patient demographics, surgical indications, and extent of resection were similar between the two groups. The median total procedure time was significantly longer for RAT (149 min) than for GTET (100 min; p = 0.018), but the contralateral recurrent laryngeal nerve was more likely to identified in RAT (100%) than in GTET (42.9%; p = 0.070). On the average, GTET needed one more surgical assistant than RAT (1 vs. 0; ppublished_or_final_versionSpringer Open Choice, 21 Feb 201

Monoidal multiplexing

Given a classical algebraic structure—e.g. a monoid or group—with carrier set X, and given a positive integer n, there is a canonical way of obtaining the same structure on carrier set Xn by defining the required operations “pointwise”. For resource-sensitive algebra (i.e. based on mere symmetric monoidal, not cartesian structure), similar “pointwise” operations are usually defined as a kind of syntactic sugar: for example, given a comonoid structure on X, one obtains a comultiplication on X⊗X by tensoring two comultiplications and composing with an appropriate permutation. This is a specific example of a general construction that we identify and refer to as multiplexing. We obtain a general theorem that guarantees that any equation that holds in the base case will hold also for the multiplexed operations, thus generalising the “pointwise” definitions of classical universal algebra