CANCUN, MEXICO (UroToday.com) - Coverage of the 25th Annual World Congress of Endourology and SWL - Cancun, Mexico - Thursday November 1, 2007

Recent introduction of articulating laparoscopic needle drivers has the potential to enable more rapid acquisition of difficult suturing skills. This study by Lucas et al randomized medical students with no laparoscopic experience into two groups to test their performance on 4 tasks (1 – needle passage through rings, 2 – oblique running suture model, 3 – urethro-vesicle anastomosis model, 4 – a renal parenchymal reconstruction model) using either a conventional or articulating laparoscopic needle driver. They found that the time for the student to complete the task was lower in the conventional needle driver group for tasks 1 and 3 but there was no difference for tasks 3 2 and 4. Higher accuracy of in all tasks was achieved with the conventional needle driver. The place of these novel articulating needle drivers in clinical practice remains to be determined and rigorous reports detailing their clinical usage in comparison to standard instruments are awaited.

Session: Laparoscopy Miscellaneous
Moderators: Sijo Parekattil (USA) and Miguel Gonzalez (Mexico)
Steven Lucas, Altug Tuncel, Karim Bensalah, Ilia S. Zeltser, Adam Jenkins, Osamah Saidi, Sangtae Park, Jeffrey A. Cadeddu

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