On this episode of Advances in Care, host Erin Welsh hears from Dr. Juan P. Rocca, a transplant surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine, who recently led the first fully robotic liver transplant in New York.

Dr. Rocca details the recent developments in robotic surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine’s Division of Liver Transplantation and Hepatobiliary Surgery, including an ongoing push to advance from laparoscopic and open surgical methods, and now to robotics. He explains why the robotic approach is optimal for complex liver surgeries, and discusses how he and his team have been training to make robotic living donor hepatectomies a standard in their department.

Then, Dr. Rocca breaks down the process of the liver transplant operation that became the first fully robotic execution in New York. He describes the most critical steps of the procedure, how it felt to achieve this milestone, and the example that he hopes to set for other institutions beyond NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine.

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Dr. Juan Rocca is the Surgical Director of the Weill Cornell Liver Cancer Program and an attending surgeon in the Division of Liver Transplantation and Hepatobiliary Surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine. He was an early adopter of laparoscopic techniques for major hepatectomy and later transitioned to robotic surgery for complex liver procedures in patients with chronic liver disease. At Weill Cornell Medicine, he led the development of a comprehensive robotic liver surgery program, encompassing liver cancer resections, living liver donation, and the state's first fully robotic liver transplant

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