Laparoscopic Surgery

What is laparoscopic surgery?

Laparoscopy is a technique for doing surgery known as minimally invasive surgery. Most often, we do laparoscopic surgery in the abdominal cavity using a laparoscope. A laparoscope is a long, thin fiber-optic camera, roughly the diameter of a pen, about a foot in length.

During your laparoscopic surgery, your doctor makes a few small cuts in your abdomen. These incisions are much smaller than cuts for open surgery. In one incision, your physician will put the long, thin camera scope. This allows him or her to see the inside of your abdominal cavity. The image appears on a screen, so your doctor knows where to cut and what to remove.

He or she will place other surgical tools through the other small incisions to do the surgery itself.

Surgeries completed with a laparoscope

• Adrenal gland surgery - Removal of adrenal masses or tumors
• Appendectomy - Removal of the appendix, like with appendicitis
• Cholecystectomy - Removal of the gallbladder
• Colon resection/Colectomy - Removal of a part of the colon (large intestine) for colon cancer or other diseases of the colon
• Nissen fundoplication - Repair of the hiatal hernia preventing gastroesophageal reflux (GERD)
• Splenectomy - Surgical removal of the spleen
• Ventral hernia repair - Repairing some ventral/abdominal wall hernias