OBJECTIVE To report the initial clinical cases of scarless, single port, transumbilical nephrectomy and pyeloplasty. PATIENTS AND METHODS One patient each underwent single port transumbilical nephrectomy and pyeloplasty using the R-Port (Advanced Surgical Concepts), inserted through a transumbilical incision in both cases. Novel, specialized instruments, curved at the shaft, were used in addi...

Significant advances have been achieved in the field of urologic laparo-endoscopic single-site surgery (LESS) since the first reported clinical series in 2007. The aim of the present review paper is to summarize and critically analyze the most recent advances in the field of urologic LESS. A literature review was performed using PubMed to retrieve publications related to LESS in urology over th...

Laparoscopic cystogastrostomy is a well-accepted minimally invasive modality to treat pancreatic pseudocysts. There has been one prior report of cystogastrostomy via single incision laparoscopic surgery (SILS) in which specialized instrumentation and access platforms were used.We report the challenges encountered in a low resource setting with the SILS approach to drainage using only standard l...

PURPOSE The authors introduce a state-of-the-art all-optical clinical diffuse optical tomography (DOT) imaging instrument which collects spatially dense, multispectral, frequency-domain breast data in the parallel-plate geometry. METHODS The instrument utilizes a CCD-based heterodyne detection scheme that permits massively parallel detection of diffuse photon density wave amplitude and phase ...

To obtain new ways of detecting weak signals, we analyzed the motion of a Duffing oscillator in different input states by solving the Duffing equation and then elaborating on the basic principles of weak signal detection based on Duffing oscillator phase-change characteristics. The experiment that shows how to achieve weak signal detection with a Duffing oscillator based on virtual instrument t...

The study confirmed the reliability and validity of the instrument for the objective evaluation of the appropriateness of surgical bed occupancy in a colorectal unit. A Canadian report on the American appropriateness evaluation protocol showed a poor validity against a panel of experts ( =0.25). A European version of the protocol has been suggested but has not been validated in a substantial st...

  Background :The incidence of recurrence in patients undergoing primary discectomy due to lumbar disc herniation (LDH), is regularly reported as 5-15%. In this study we aimed to evaluate surgical outcome of instrumented transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (TLIF) in the patients suffering from recurrent LDH.   Methods : We retrospectively studied 51 patients (30 female, 21 male) from August ...