Sometimes a long trocar is a good thing: when your patient has a BMI of 40, for example, there will be a fair amount of abdominal fat to plow through. Sometimes, however, a long trocar is not so desirable: when you have just driven it into the aorta, say, or when it starts bumping into neighboring trocars or instruments during procedures.

Over at the Surgiquest booth in the SAGES exhibit hall, we tried out a new product called AnchorPort, which is a gun-deployed trocar with a minimal intra-abdominal profile.

The trocar itself is a stretchable piece of plastic that is loaded onto the shaft of a deployment gun, which has an optional laparoscope port so you can monitor where the trocar is going. The shaft is bluntly pushed through the abdominal incision, and then the trocar is released. It squeezes both sides of the abdominal wall, and a plastic bulb on the inner side gives enough resistance to prevent the trocar from being inadvertently removed:

We were assured that with an actual abdomen, you can just pull the gun out without having to secure the trocar with your fingers; the foam block used in this video, however, wasn’t strong enough for that. The trocar is removed using the gun, running the same steps in reverse.

The port itself is 5mm. As shown in the picture above, there are both short and long versions. The reps wouldn’t give us an exact cost for these, but they assured us that they probably cost the same or less as the trocars we’re already using.