In an unprecedented medical achievement, King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center succeeded in performing the first complete liver transplant using a robot in the world, for a Saudi patient in his sixties who suffered from non-alcoholic fatty liver (NASH) and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)
The leader of the medical team carrying out the operation, Executive Director of the Center of Excellence for Organ Transplantation, Professor Dieter Brüring, explained that this qualitative achievement confirms “KFSH&RC’s” commitment to medical innovation and enhancing the quality of health care services provided to patients around the world, indicating that the success achieved for fully robotic liver transplant operations represents a pivotal shift in the history of organ transplantation, and confirms KFSH&RC’s position as a world-leading center in this field, reports Al-Rai daily.
King Faisal Specialist Hospital is unique in the world in performing a complete liver transplant using a robot in the resection and transplantation stages, after it had adopted an approach that combined traditional and robotic surgeries in carrying out the transplantation process, and since 2018 it has relied entirely on robotic surgery to partially remove the liver from living donors.
Fully robotic liver transplantation is distinguished from others by making smaller incisions in the patient’s body, reducing the recovery period, and reducing the possibility of complications, unlike traditional liver transplantation or the hybrid approach, which involves making an incision in the patient’s body up to 15 cm long, which leads to Complications may occur in 50 percent of cases, requiring a longer stay in the hospital.
This achievement represents a transformation in the services provided by Al-Khassusi to specialists in organ transplantation, as the hospital is a specialized training center in robotic organ transplantation surgery, through which it cooperates with other medical institutions to exchange knowledge and enhance global understanding of minimally invasive organ transplantation procedures.
King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center is among the most prominent hospitals in the world in providing specialized health care, and was recently ranked 20th in the list of the best health care institutions in the world for the year 2023, and first in the Middle East and Africa, according to the Brand Finance classification. According to what was published by Al Arabiya.net.