A team of surgeons at NYU Langone Health performed the first fully robotic lung transplant in the nation, making the medical center the third-ever health system in the world to carry out the procedure using robotics.

The surgical team at NYU Langone’s Transplant Institute — led by director of the institute’s lung transplant program Stephanie Chang — used a robotic system to perform the procedure, from the removal of the patient’s infected lung to the insertion of the transplant. Chang said the robotic system would lead to a smoother recovery period for patients.

“Even today, when we do a lung transplant, we’re using an open incision that’s very, very painful,” Chang said in an interview with WSN. “General lung cancer surgery and esophageal cancer surgery, like most other surgeries, have made advances in minimally invasive techniques that allow for better healing and less pain for patients, and that allows for faster recovery — that’s what we’re aiming to do here with the robotic platform.”

Chang said that although the procedure went smoothly, robotic surgery will not become the immediate norm for all lung transplants at NYU Langone because it depends on the patient’s medical condition. 

“A lot of patients are still very sick, or they have anatomic things that make it so that robotics might not be the best,” she said. “But it is something that we’re going to start offering for, you know, select patients in our program.” 

While a hospital in Los Angeles used a robotic system for the final stage of the procedure in 2022 — marking the world’s first robot-assisted lung transplant — the first fully robotic lung transplant took place at a hospital in Spain in 2023. 

Last year, NYU Langone conducted 76 lung transplants and was ranked first in the country for lung survival after transplant.

Contact Audrey Abrahams at [email protected].