 I'm the director of our head and neck robotic surgery program at the University of Maryland. It's a pleasure to develop this program where we're able to offer minimally invasive techniques to treat tumors of the throat. Most commonly we see these cancers present in the tonsil or on the back part of the tongue or the base of tongue that are associated with the human papillomavirus. This cancer is something that has very few side effects for many of our patients and patients often present with already a lymph node metastasis and they don't appreciate that there's a small cancer that's residing in the back part of the throat. More traditional open approaches often result in sometimes facial scars or impacts to your speech and swallowing performance of your everyday life and robotic surgery was developed and designed to really minimize those side effects so that you can recover faster and closer to your baseline than ever before. It's intimidating to think that you may be having a robot operate on your throat but this is something that's controlled by me as your surgeon. It is not an autonomous robot. I am actually in a console on the other side of the room where my hands are really shrunken down to very small instruments that have a small footprint and can remove tumors in the back part of the throat seamlessly and efficiently. One of the best parts about this technique is the robot doesn't have any incisions on the outside of the body and can remove tumors in less than about a half an hour and patients can honestly go home, fortunately, in just two to three days after surgery and get back to their eating and drinking as fast as possible.