TransEnterix: Managing Revolutions in Surgery
Article preview reprinted from IN VIVO - May, 2009
Minimally invasive surgery, performed through a number of ports to create access and enable visualization, manipulation, and dissection, promised to revolutionize surgical techniques two decades ago, but ultimately fell short of changing the way surgeons perform the majority of surgical cases. Now, the next generation in minimally invasive surgery sees single-port surgeries and natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgeries (NOTES) gaining momentum. TransEnterix aims to operate in both cases, with a novel approach that not only allows surgeons greater dexterity in performing complex procedures, but also enables them to do surgical cases through a single access port, using the body's umbilicus. Read more...
TransEnterix: Managing Revolutions in Surgery
Article preview reprinted from IN VIVO - May, 2009
Minimally invasive surgery, performed through a number of ports to create access and enable visualization, manipulation, and dissection, promised to revolutionize surgical techniques two decades ago, but ultimately fell short of changing the way surgeons perform the majority of surgical cases.
Part of the problem: surgeons were uncomfortable with the devices developed to enable more complex procedures. TransEnterix's solution: surgical tools that adapt the flexible catheter technology behind interventional cardiology to general surgery.
TransEnterix's novel approach not only allows surgeons greater dexterity in performing complex procedures, but also enables them to do surgical cases through a single access port, using the body's umbilicus.
So-called single-port surgery has its skeptics, but it's gaining momentum. The question for TransEnterix: how will single-port surgery play out against the surgery's newest technique--natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery, or NOTES?
For all of the change that minimally invasive approaches brought to surgery two decades ago, the MIS revolution has fallen something short of complete. While conversion to MIS or laparoscopic techniques was rapid and remains at nearly 100% in gall bladder removal (cholecystectomy), other procedures have taken longer to convert and have come nowhere near the same rate of penetration—thus procedures such as bowel resection and appendectomy are only performed laparoscopically about 50% of the time; in an area like cardiac surgery, penetration rates have stalled at much lower numbers.
- David Cassak
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