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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How would you feel if the surgeon performing an endoscopic procedure on you was naked… and on another continent? Sounds good, right?
Well, that may happen soon, thanks to telepresence surgery.

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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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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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Surgeons at UCSD made history last month by performing the first NOTES appendectomy in the United States. We spoke with lead surgeon Dr. Santiago Horgan about the details of the procedure and the future of the NOTES technique.

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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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In a sign that the future of minimally-invasive surgery is surely upon us, Dr. Ralph Clayman, Dr. Geoffrey Box and colleagues at UC Irvine report in this month’s Journal of Endourology that they have successfully performed a robot-assisted NOTES nephrectomy on a porcine model.

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Last week we posted some stunning images taken with our new DUR-D ureteroscope. Today, we bring you video from this device, captured inside the watery depths of the collecting system.

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…unless you are one of the lucky few to have a high-definition laparoscope in your operating room. Since last summer we’ve been capturing footage from our 1080p/60fps Storz laparoscopes using a Sony XDCAM recording deck. If you haven’t seen a procedure in HD before, do yourself a favor and check out this very brief clip […]

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