The lower esophageal sphincter is a bothersome little junction that so often fails to do its job: either it’s too loose and burps up hot acid after each meal, or it’s too tight and won’t let anything down. Although we jam all sorts of devices down there to determine the need for surgical intervention, it’s […]

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At SAGES we got the distinct impression that every surgical procedure known to man has a one-way ticket to NOTESville. If that’s the case, then surgeons will need to get a lot more comfortable manipulating endoscopes, as their unintuitive controls tend to frighten novices. We stopped over at the Simbionix booth to check out their GI […]

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The exhibit hall at SAGES 2008 was something of an HD wonderland; everywhere you turned, there was another laparoscope pointing at a flower, the minute stalks of the stamen revealed in excruciating detail on a nearby flatscreen.
Of all the high definition systems shown, we must say that we were the least impressed with the optics […]

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High definition laparoscopes offer phenomenal images, but as recently as this week we bemoaned the lack of user-friendly high definition recording platforms in the operating room. Sony’s new ImageCore HD, being shown this weekend in the SAGES exhibit hall, changes everything. This thing is so user-friendly and feature-loaded that, frankly, we can’t believe we’ve lived so long […]

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SurgeXperiences is a biweekly round-up of the latest happenings in the surgical blogosphere. Each edition is written by a different website, and this time we have the privilege of playing host. So please, sit back, enjoy, and don’t forget to tip your server on the way out. Let’s get to it.

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In what will come as news to almost no one, researchers have found that “after hours” procedures, defined as those beginning after 4PM, are associated with higher rates of complications than procedures starting between 7AM-4PM, even after excluding emergency cases and controlling for patient and procedure conditions.

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There is an amazing amount of hype and bad data surrounding the use of hemostatic and sealing agents. Despite thousands of manuscripts published on the various glues, pastes and potions currently being hawked, there is a major dearth of solid information.

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