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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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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 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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Minimally invasive procedures are utterly remarkable.  The fact that one can dissect and mobilize an entire specimen with just tiny incisions is a testament to surgical skill and the amazing technologies available in the operating theater.  After a challenging extirpative laparoscopic case there is great satisfaction in seeing the large specimen mobilized.
But that’s where the […]

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The Pitch is a new, recurring feature on OpNotes in which we invite a manufacturer to fill out a standard questionnaire about a novel device, and we then independently choose an expert user to comment. If you would like your device to be featured on The Pitch, please e-mail editor (at) opnotes.com.
In this edition of […]

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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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A recent article details several new features being developed for the da Vinci robot by researchers at the Imperial College of London. In other news, machines are rapidly overtaking man.

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We have recently started to use the DUR-D ureteroscope for ureteroscopy, and it has provided us a detailed view of the ureters and kidneys like we have never seen before. I had heard, however, that the DUR-D does not do well in a bloody field, and today we had our first case using the DUR-D […]

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