Background & Objective:Open radical cystectomy is the standard procedure for the treatment of muscle-invasive bladder cancer. There has been a recent trend towards minimally invasive techniques aiming to decrease blood loss, hospital stay, and complications. Therefore, hand-assisted cystectomy (HAC) emerged as a rational choice, combining the merits of laparoscopic surgery with the feasibility of performing a continent urinary reservoir in a reasonable operative time and with reasonable treatment costs. Patients & Methods:Forty patients with invasive bladder carcinoma were offered radical cystectomy with the HAC approach. Thirty-two men and 8 women underwent HAC. The mean age was 57.5 years. The mean operation time was 200 minutes for the extirpative part and 90 minutes for the reconstructive part of the procedure. Estimated blood loss was 450 ml. The mean hospitalization time was 17 days (range of 10 to 30). At a median follow-up of 2 years, no cases of port-site, incisional, or isolated pelvic recurrence was detected. The median DFS is 14.6 month (95%CI = 13.2-15.8).Conclusions: HAC is a rational procedure that can be used to perform radical surgery of invasive bladder carcinoma and orthotopic urinary diversion.