Record of organ donations and transplants
September 2, 2019
The Jimi Hendrix of the operating room
September 3, 2019
The peculiarity is that a single incision is combined under the sternum with the patient's sedation. The technique avoids nerve areas, minimizes pain and recovery is much faster and more effective.
September 2, 2019 has already become a historic and indelible date in the history of the Miguel Servet hospital in Zaragoza. Yesterday the center hosted the first thoracic operation in Europe in which two peculiarities occurred: a single incision was made via the subxiphoid (below the sternum) instead of several intercostal incisions and the patient was sedated instead of connected to a machine. That is, she did not have intubation and, therefore, she was not connected to a breathing machine.
The novel procedure is performed through a non-invasive technique that benefits the patient in the postoperative period and, above all, minimizes pain. Its implementation in Servet has been possible thanks to the visit yesterday of the prestigious surgeon Diego González Rivas, who "successfully" operated on a woman suffering from lung cancer using a uniportal VATS, the technique that he himself created and that involves Perform video-assisted thoracic surgery through a single door.
González is a world leader in this type of operations and the director of the unit that develops this process at the Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital. Until now, the usual technique is to make several 2 to 3 centimeter incisions and access the lung through the intercostal spaces. «In this way, instead of entering through the ribs, where there are many nerves and causes more pain, we access below the sternum, via the subxiphoid. There, with a single incision, the lobe where the lesion is located is extracted," explained the surgeon.
