SANTO DOMINGO, RD/ DIARIO DE SALUD – Percutaneous surgery has revolutionized the practice of medicine in recent years, as it is an innovative minimally invasive procedure, with minimal access to the body to treat conditions of various organs, without the need for open surgeries.
Even many other procedures that are traditionally done open can now be performed through percutaneous surgery, for example, a gastrostomy that is used to feed patients when they cannot do so naturally.
The information was offered by Dr. Pedro Peña, hepatobiliopancreatic and abdominal organ transplant surgeon at Hospiten Santo Domingo, who defined percutaneous surgery “as a specialty that relies on diagnostic images such as sonography, tomography, etc., to perform guided procedures through the skin.”
“In this specialty, basically, we use small ports the size of a needle to reach what is a condition, for example, liver cancer, which we can reach with a needle through the skin without having to open it, reach to that injury and destroy it without the need for surgery.”
Among the modalities of percutaneous surgery – Peña explained – is radiofrequency ablation, microwaves and irreversible electroporation, which are tumor ablation techniques that are performed guided by images.
Through the skin, he said, the tumor is reached, “whether liver or even thyroid tumors, where the nodule is reached and the entire visible tumor lesion is destroyed thermally, with heat, without the need for surgery.”
In addition, there are other image-guided procedures such as performing percutaneous gastrostomy, percutaneous drainage of the bile duct in those patients with bile duct obstruction that causes increased bilirubin levels, among many others.
Dr. Pedro Peña indicated that these techniques “benefit the patient as they are outpatient processes, compared to previous methods in which open surgeries are used in which the patient has to spend five or six days in the hospital. “New treatments are revolutionizing medicine, allowing almost immediate recovery, with little pain.”
Organs that can be transplanted
Dr. Peña also defined the organs of the human body that are possible and qualify for transplants when they have some insufficiency.
“Among the organs that qualify to be transplanted, in general, are the heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, kidney and there is even talk of an intestine transplant. “I focus on liver, pancreas and kidney transplants,” the doctor reported.
However, he said, these transplants are only performed in those patients who present failure of those organs, whether it is end-stage liver failure, end-stage renal failure or in those patients, in the case of the pancreas, who present diabetes due to endocrine insufficiency of that type. gland,” Peña pointed out.
About Hospital
Hospiten is an international health network committed to providing a top quality service, with more than 50 years of experience, which has 20 private medical-hospital centers in Spain, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Jamaica and Panama, and more than 100 outpatient medical centers, under the Clinic Assist brand. Founded by Dr. Pedro Luis Cobiella, it serves more than two million patients from all over the world annually, and has a staff of more than 5,000 people.
