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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Despite all of the breathless praise being heaped on NOTES at this year’s SAGES, there was still considerable excitement about single port access laparoscopy, another kind of über-minimally invasive surgery that has made great strides over the past year. In this two-part series, we’ll take a look at some of the devices that have made this platform […]

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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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During the SAGES emerging technologies session, which to us was like an early Christmas, Dr. Dmitry Nepomnayshy presented his experience using the EndoBarrier, an endoscopically-deployed impermeable tube that is placed in the duodenum to prevent absorption.
Two patients have received the full treatment so far; within twelve weeks, one lost 11 pounds and the other 26 pounds. […]

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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 […]

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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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In a sign that there are way too many surgical meshes out there, SAGES dedicated an entire morning panel to a discussion of the subject titled “The Explosion of Biomaterials for Hernia Repair; What Do I Do?”. The answer, apparently, is: we don’t know. 

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In an earlier post, we explored one combination of robotics and NOTES that involved deploying da Vinci instrumentation through transvaginal and transcolonic trocars.
At the NOTES symposium at SAGES today, Dr. Dmitry Oleynikov of the University of Nebraska Medical Center upped the technological ante even further, debuting a new mini robot that is contained entirely within the […]

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 There’s no question that the increased clarity and anatomic detail of high definition images are major advantages during laparoscopy. So far we’ve used the Storz and Stryker systems and have been impressed with both. Recording the beautiful images they provide, however, remains a major remaining challenge. Although Storz and Stryker each offer their own capture systems, both […]

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