In the old days, one could refine surgical technique with just sutures and a board of styrofoam. Now, in order to learn laparoscopy, interns and residents have to use super-expensive simulators to which most hospitals don’t even have access. So even though laparoscopy is known to offer many advantages over open procedures, many surgeons still […]

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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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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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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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Over at Covidien’s website there’s a sign-up form for the “worldwide launch” of the LigaSure Advance at SAGES. We’re not exactly sure what they have planned, but we previewed this device a few weeks back and were quite pleased with it.
We’ll be publishing some initial reactions to the Advance after the event, so send us […]

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We’re getting just a little closer to hassle-free 3D images in the operating room. Last week Samsung announced that their line-up of 3D-ready televisions would finally debut in South Korea, and should be arriving in the United States in the next month or so.

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