Abstract
Objective: Laparoscopic surgery includes advantages such as: ① Less postoperative pain, ② Shorter hospital stay, ③ Less postoperative adhesions, and ④ Cosmetic postoperative wound. Currently, it is possible to treat most benign gynecological diseases by laparoscopic surgery. The use of laparoscopic equipment has increased in a number of surgical specialties. Selection of the appropriate equipment must take into account the type of surgical procedures for which it will be used.
Methods: Our hospital owns three types of rigid laparoscopes manufactured by Olympus. Co. Ltd., (3 mm, 5 mm, and 10 mm diameter) and the choice of instrument has been at the surgeon's discretion.. Therefore, we designed this study to evaluate predictors for the most appropriate diameter laparoscope for a surgical procedure; we performed comparison examinations of the illumination level and viewing area provided by each laparoscope diameter.
Results: Using an illuminometer, the degree of brightness was compared at a distance of 30 cm from the subject. The degree of illumination per each laparoscope diameter increased as the diameter increased (Figure 1). The degree of illumination was 330 luxes with a 3 mm diameter scope. A 2.44-fold difference in brightness was observed between laparoscopes with a diameter of 3 mm and 10 mm.
Conclusions: It is important to select an endoscope diameter according to the surgical procedure. Selecting a laparoscope with a diameter of 5 mm was found to be the most suitable for a variety of surgical procedures for benign gynecological disease.
