Laparoscopic telescope with Alpha Port and Aesop to view open surgical procedures

Laparoscopy has advanced surgery by allowing the surgeon to operate within a patient's abdominal and pelvic cavity with minimal trauma and scarring. T he coupling of a video camera to the laparoscopic telescope has had the sec ondary effect of allowing others to view the surgical field either on color video monitors or by watching the video feed over the Internet at a remote location. These advancements have allowed better teaching and mentoring of operations. Open procedures can benefit from this technology as well but h ave suffered in the past from inadequate methods to depict the open surgica l field. We used the Alpha Port and Aesop robot to position a sterile lapar oscopic telescope near the surgical field to view open cholecystectomies pe rformed on five pigs and to send the video feed over the Internet to remote physicians. Viewing the video on the monitor, the surgeons performed the o peration in a comfortable ergonomic upright position. Both the surgeons and the remote physicians found the quality of the video to be excellent, and the remote physicians felt comfortable learning and mentoring surgical proc edures using this technique.