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. The coupling of a video camera to the laparoscopic telescope has had the secondary 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 have suffered in the past from inadequate methods to depict the open surgical field. We used the Alpha Port and Aesop robot to position a sterile laparoscopic telescope near the surgical field to view open cholecystectomies performed 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 operation 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 procedures using this technique.