Anesthetic implications for robot-assisted transaxillary thyroid and parathyroid surgery: a report of twenty cases.

Gasless transaxillary robot-assisted endoscopic thyroid surgery has recently been proposed and developed in South Korea and the United States. Perianesthetic implications and their evolution for 20 patients scheduled to undergo this innovative surgical technique are presented. The anesthetic considerations focus on the length of surgery due to the learning curve, the risk of the ipsilateral arm posture, and postoperative pain evaluation and management.