Although laparoscopic procedures are largely considered clean, safe affairs, there is one major complication that can happen early on in all of them — namely, the harpooning of an organ or major vessel with a Veress needle, which is blindly inserted in the abdomen at the beginning of most cases to achieve initial insufflation.

Although such injuries are infrequent — according to research (here, here, and here), the incidence is somewhere around 1% or lower — they can become major crises. Hence the justification for Aragon Surgical’s LapCap, a new device that uses standard suction to pull up a cone of abdominal wall while leaving viscera and deep vessels behind. The claim is that by inserting needles into this cone, the likelihood of misplacement or injury goes from small to non-existent.

Our first thought was — okay, that sounds great, but how do you explain a dinnerplate-sized abdominal hickey to the patient? Fortunately, according to those who have used the LapCap, it’s a non-issue because the suction doesn’t cause bruising. Then we wondered: what about bowel adhesions? Well, yes, of course you still have to watch out for those.

Is this device worth the single-use cost of $140? It’s hard to say: although Aragon claims that in 48 clinical trials the device showed no needle injuries at all, such injuries are so rare in the first place that, without many thousands of trials, you’d be hard-pressed to find them even in a control group. Does it nonetheless look like fun to suck up huge globs of skin and fat, and then poke at them? Yes, definitely.