Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
Issue link: http://outpatientsurgery.uberflip.com/i/168873
OSE_1309_part2_Layout 1 9/6/13 12:24 PM Page 104 V I S U A L I Z A T I O N angles of view. The scopes' fixed view made it difficult to see the top or bottom of tissue. Thanks to our industry partners that have developed endoscopes with flexible tips at the end, we're able to look at our target from different angles. We can direct the tip up, down, left and right with the press of a tiny lever. A tremendously helpful advance for some surgical procedures, yes, but one that added a bit of a learning curve and required additional training. • Prisms. A recent innovation is a rigid scope with a prism at the end of it that lets you click your way to a different angle of view. Prisms offer a great way to look at things from different perspectives. You can change the angle of the lens with a dial. You can get either a straight-on view or a 30-degree view with a single scope, for example. • Binocular optics. The development of binocular telescopes that deliver 3-dimensional, high-resolution images marks the next evolution in optics. These scopes offer really good depth perception. These binocular optical systems come with 2 lenses, each providing an image to each eye. Some surgeons have a hard time getting oriented in 3D space with a monocular optical system, while others make that leap seamlessly and find it extremely enabling. It's too early to know whether this is a game-changer, but it has the potential to be so. • Ultrasound. With laparoscopy, you only get visual information about the surface of internal structures. But that tumor you see from the surface might be the tip of the iceberg. It would be nice to get a view of what's underneath the surface of our target tissue. An experimental concept worth tracking is a scope that would provide traditional laparoscopic views with real-time ultrasound to see beneath the surface. It would fuse volumetric (3D) with surface views. We could evaluate a tissue's density and its characteristics in conjunction with the surface view provided by the scopes. None of these developments require larger incisions or increase the 1 0 4 O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | S E P T E M B E R 2013 KAR KAR KAR KAR A-07