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A major obstacle to the acceptability of scarless endoscopic thyroid surgery (SET) amongst surgeons is the perceived potential of nerve injury in the absence of seamless Intraoperative Nerve Monitoring (IONM). Whilst IONM can be easily carried out in conventional thyroidectomy with improved outcomes, most centres performing SET do not regularly attempt confirmatory visual documentation of the recurrent laryngeal nerve due to technical difficulty and many surgeons safeguard the nerve by leaving behind a rim of thyroid tissue along the suspensory ligament. Very few studies have evaluated the feasibility and technique of regular confirmatory visualization and safeguarding of the recurrent laryngeal nerves during SET.
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Rao et al. (2020) studied this question.
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