Totally Endoscopic Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery (TECAB) is an entirely
endoscopic
An endoscopy is a procedure used in medicine to look inside the body. The endoscopy procedure uses an endoscope to examine the interior of a hollow organ or cavity of the body. Unlike many other medical imaging techniques, endoscopes are insert ...
robotic surgery
Robotic surgery are types of surgical procedures that are done using robotic systems. Robotically assisted surgery was developed to try to overcome the limitations of pre-existing minimally-invasive surgical procedures and to enhance the capabi ...
used to treat
coronary heart disease
Coronary artery disease (CAD), also called coronary heart disease (CHD), ischemic heart disease (IHD), myocardial ischemia, or simply heart disease, involves the reduction of blood flow to the heart muscle due to build-up of atherosclerotic pl ...
, developed in the late 1990s. It is an advanced form of
Minimally Invasive Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery, which allows bypass surgery to be conducted
off-pump without opening the ribcage. The technique involves three or four small holes in the chest cavity through which two robotic arms, and one camera are inserted.
TECAB technology
TECAB surgery uses the da Vinci tele-robotic
Stereoscopic 3-D Imaging system. The system consists of a robotic "slave" system at the bedside. The robot relays its information to an external surgical control unit, where a
cardiac surgeon
Cardiac surgery, or cardiovascular surgery, is surgery on the heart or great vessels performed by cardiac surgeons. It is often used to treat complications of ischemic heart disease (for example, with coronary artery bypass grafting); to corr ...
has a three-dimensional view of the chest cavity, and twin controllers for the robotic arms. The procedure frequently involves
grafting of the
internal mammary artery to the
diseased coronary artery, and therefore does not require external harvesting of blood vessels.
References
{{Cardiac surgery procedures
Endoscopy
Cardiac surgery