Laparoscopy was one of the first minimally invasive surgical techniques, using tubes, fiber optic cameras, and tiny instruments, and it serves as the basis for many procedures still used today.
Robotic techniques work similarly. Instead of manually controlling the instruments inside your body, the surgeon takes control of a robot that in turn operates special surgical tools that can often move in ways that manually controlled tools could not. This allows your surgeon to complete complex surgical procedures in a minimally invasive fashion. Some robotic surgeries can even be done through a single incision rather than multiple small incisions.
Both fields experience constant innovation and refinements. These developments permit the conversion of more procedures over to minimally invasive techniques. This, in turn, reduces the impact of surgery on the secondary tissue. With no large incisions to close and heal, surgical recovery times reduce, and often other complications of surgery, such as infection, don’t occur as often.