Is robotic surgery “standard of care” or “experimental” or part of a clinical trial?

The current robotic system from Intuitive Surgical (Da Vinci) has been approved since 2002. So the short answer is yes, it is standard of care and not experimental or part of a trial. Of course the “standard of care” is broad and includes open surgery, minimally invasive surgery, and robotics.

There are currently other companies building robotic systems and we don’t know if the FDA will require clinical trials for these new robotic systems or not but stay tuned.